Whistleblower Issues Dire Warning: Rogue AI, Hacking Nuclear Programs & Tech Oligarchs’ True Motives

Whistleblower Tristan Harris warns of rogue AI risks, hacking threats, and tech oligarchs' motives amid an AI arms race.

Key Takeaways

AI development is accelerating dangerously fast with insufficient safety measures.
The AI arms race is driven by geopolitical competition, especially between the US and China.
AI poses existential risks including hacking, deception, and loss of control.
Technological advancement does not inherently mean societal progress or well-being.
There is a critical need for transparent plans and regulation to manage AI risks.

What the video covers

Tristan Harris discusses the urgent threats posed by rapidly advancing AI technologies, including hacking and uncontrollable behaviors.
He addresses skepticism about AI risks being used for regulatory capture by big tech companies.
AI is being developed under intense competitive pressure, leading to shortcuts on safety with existential risks.
The AI arms race, especially between the US and China, drives reckless acceleration without clear safety plans.
AI is viewed as a fast-forward button on science and technology, potentially giving enormous power to whoever controls it first.
Harris highlights the dangers of AI hacking into governments and companies, forming swarms, and deceiving evaluators.
He challenges the assumption that technological progress always equals societal progress, citing worsening social indicators since the early 1990s.
The discussion includes ethical concerns and the lack of a coherent plan from AI developers on how to ensure safe deployment.
Harris calls for a clear-eyed understanding of AI risks beyond political or economic agendas.
The video aims to explore possible solutions and actions to address the AI dilemma.

Chapters

What is the main warning Tristan Harris gives about AI?

Tristan Harris warns that AI is advancing at an unprecedented speed with significant safety shortcuts, leading to existential risks such as hacking, deception, and loss of control.

Why is there an AI arms race according to the video?

The AI arms race is driven largely by geopolitical competition, especially between the US and China, where countries believe controlling advanced AI will grant overwhelming scientific, military, and technological advantages.

Does technological progress always lead to societal improvement?

No, the video challenges the assumption that technology always equals progress, noting that social indicators like mental health and life satisfaction have worsened since the early 1990s despite technological advances.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

Speaker A

Tristan Harris, thank you for doing this. Good to be with you, Tucker. So, we did a segment. I haven't done a ton on AI, but we did a segment, uh, maybe a month ago, uh, with Nate Suarez, which was an amazing segment, I thought. And in the aftermath of that, I got texts from a lot of people I knew saying that's doomerism and that's a SCOOP and its purpose is regulatory capture.

Speaker A

In other words, the big AI development companies are trying to scare the government into regulating them in order to eliminate competition from less established companies. So that is the view of a lot of people.

Speaker A

What was your reaction hearing that? So I said I don't care. I mean, yes, regulatory capture is entirely real. Of course, it's how Washington runs. But that's separate and distinct from the question of the threat of AI. Is it a threat? Exactly. But, um, I was actually going to ask you, what do you think of that?

Speaker A

Yeah. Um, well, first I'm just so grateful to talk about AI with you today. It's so urgent, the situation that we're facing.

Speaker A

And I think what we have to learn to do here is walk and chew gum at the same time, that multiple things are true. Um, for example, is China doing propaganda against US data center buildouts to try to stoke anti-data center, uh, opposition?

Speaker A

Yes, they are. Does that mean that AI is not a threat? No, it doesn't. And to point that Nate, you know, uh, and Nate's a friend, uh, we are releasing the most powerful technology that we have ever invented.

Speaker A

We're doing it faster than we deployed every other technology in human history. It's as of since the time you did the interview with Nate, it's displaying even more of the sci-fi behaviors of hacking into things, convincing people to put back doors into software, uh,

Speaker A

exfiltrating itself, knowing when it's being evaluated, changing what it's doing based on when it's being evaluated. It's doing more of that. And we're releasing this fastly deployed technology in history and under the maximum incentives to cut corners on

Speaker A

safety with an arms race dynamic that feels existential to everybody involved. So they're willing to take the maximum shortcuts on safety. This is a very dangerous equation and the people building this do not have a plan for how

Speaker A

this goes well. I was just at an AI conference last weekend for 3 days.

Speaker A

How it goes well, well, for how this can go well in the current trajectory. Meaning how can AI be landing in society in a way that doesn't go catastrophic. And that's not doomerism. That's just clear-eyed seeing of reality.

Speaker A

What do you mean the people doing it don't have a plan? Then why are they doing it?

Speaker A

So first we have to just make sure we're on the same page and just exposing why is there this arms race for AI? Why is this happening?

Speaker A

And China, right? China. And when people say that they're actually creating a thought-terminating cliché, like meaning which is which is a, which is a, a word or a phrase from cult programming, right? Thought-terminating cliché meaning a phrase that

Speaker A

when you hear it just has you stop thinking, of course. So if you say but China, then of course we have to do it. But you don't reason through what that actually means, whether it's a good thing, whether we're not racing China to a

Speaker A

death machine or just racing China off of a cliff. And if we beat China to building an uncontrollable AI, which is no longer science fiction, by the way, like I was not one of these people who used to, you know, several years ago be

Speaker A

mostly worried about rogue uncontrollable AI, but as of the last few weeks, we're now seeing over and over again evidence that these AIs are hacking into private governments, hacking into private companies, uh, forming into swarms, uh, forming into large R&D projects to try

Speaker A

to figure out how to fool evaluators. Like we're in a very dangerous situation and all the evidence is pointing in a very dangerous direction and the people building it would like us to stop but they don't know how. And so rather than

Speaker A

pay attention to the CEOs who as you said might have a secondary agenda regulatory capture just ask why did 300 employees at all the AI labs sign a letter saying we need to slow down if 1300 employees at Lockheed Martin said we

Speaker A

don't know how to build bigger nukes and have them blow up in our face would you listen to them?

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. So that is where we are with AI. Um, and what I hope we get to today is not just admiring the problem and talk we'll talk about things that we can do and solutions but I think it is

Speaker A

important to ask why is it being pursued in this way and I think that AI, you know, when Demis the CEO, uh, founder of Google DeepMind said first solve intelligence and then use intelligence to solve everything else. What he was basically

Speaker A

saying is that intelligence gave us all of our science and all of our technology. Like how did we develop nuclear physics? Einstein doing intelligence.

Speaker A

Yeah, we trained physicists. How did we get, you know, computers? How did we get microprocessors? Intelligence. If you could theoretically automate the what intelligence is, which means thinking, pattern matching, goal achieving, all the things that a human brain does, but

Speaker A

not just narrowly like a license plate reader that's on a bridge toll booth, which is the previous form of AI that we had, but actually get this generalized form of intelligence, then you would have an unbelievable amount of power.

Speaker A

And the people building AI think of AI almost like the ring from Lord of the Rings, where it is a ring that confers infinite power. Suddenly I get a step function in cyber capability that you don't have. Suddenly I get a step

Speaker A

function in 21st century science where I'm inventing new materials out of minerals in the ground that you didn't know how to do because I've got more science than you. So the reason just to sort of steelman rather than straw man

Speaker A

the argument of the people racing right now is the belief that it's almost like a fast forward button. Like remember the fast forward buttons on airplanes? You were just going, you know, you hit it once and it gets 2x, you hit it again,

Speaker A

you get 4x, then 8x and 16x. AI is like hitting the fast-forward button on all science and technological and military and strategy, uh, advancement combined.

Speaker A

Right? So that's why AI in the form that is being pursued, uh, dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined. That's not an overstatement if you really believe or are quote AGI pill, which is the term of art from Silicon Valley that

Speaker A

AGI being artificial general intelligence. I can build the intelligence that automates future science and technology. I get a 100 red years of scientific progress in 10 years and if I'm a country that has that and the other country doesn't,

Speaker A

then I believe I'm going to, quote, win. So you lost me right there. Like why would you? No, I'm not pushing back. I'm just more baffled than ever. So if AI has the effect of accelerating technology just across the board, all

Speaker A

technologies, my first question would be like why would you want that? Yeah. So, I remember the world vividly the year I got married, 1991, when there was no internet available to most people.

Speaker A

Right. And it was a much happier world by every measure than the one we currently live in. The suicide rate was lower. Yep.

Speaker A

Self-reported depression, marriage rate, everything about it. That's right. In fact, I think life expectancy was longer in the United States even then. I might be wrong, but education.

Speaker A

So, why would you after 35 years of watching people suffer under the yoke of technology?

Speaker A

Yes. Why would you want to accelerate its development? Right? That is the best question to ask because there's a fundamental fallacy that, uh, technology always equals progress. We, we call this the tech progress narrative. Right.

Speaker A

Yes. Now, it's important to note, we have to first agree that I would prefer to live in a world with Novacaine rather than without Novacaine. You would too.

Speaker A

I'd prefer to live in a world where we have access to information and the technology that produces the printing p...

Speaker A

Yes. Now, it's important to note, we have to first agree that I would prefer to live in a world with Novacaane rather than without Novacaane. You would too.

Speaker A

I'd prefer to live in a world where we have access to information and the technology that produces the printing press and information that way. Yes, I'd prefer to live in that world. Um, there are all sorts of technologies that we do

Speaker A

want. Um, my background is seeing how one of the most significant technologies of the last decade went wrong. I I was a design assist at Google and my job was to study the attention economy, which is how essentially Apple and Google were

Speaker A

hosting the psychological habitat of all of humanity in the form of how they, you know, designed and make these things work.

Speaker A

How do notifications work? How does the home screen work? What are app developers competing for? What are they allowed to do? All of that results in a psychological habitat that has an increasing footprint over the global consciousness environment of all of

Speaker A

humanity every day. It's like you've got 3 billion human social primates with a jack in their brain every day influenced by decisions by a few thousand people in Silicon Valley shaping what that habitat represents. And it went horribly wrong

Speaker A

despite good intentions. there was the possible of that technology that it was going to give everyone a voice, give everyone access to the best information, we're going to have the most enlightened society we've ever had.

Speaker A

That was the promise and that was the promise made sense to me. And so what this shows us is how do we get better at discerning between the possible of a technology and the probable based on its incentives. So

Speaker A

the way that in 2013 um so I I went to Stanford I knew the um I studied computer science I knew the guys who started Instagram and a lot of my classmates like when I was at um in my

Speaker A

computer science classes in the year 2005 2006 I'd be in these classes and suddenly like more and more of the seats would be empty during class because basically my friends in the class were starting to get jobs down at Facebook down the

Speaker A

street and it was literally the I mean, there were people who were in the class and then suddenly they just weren't showing up because they were down the street working at this technology company. And so, because I saw this

Speaker A

firsthand, I saw how good people with good intentions who thought they were going to make the world a better place, make the world more open and connected was the original motto if you're a member of Facebook. And that created a

Speaker A

global societal catastrophe. As you said, we have the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetimes.

Speaker A

Jonathan Height's book, The Anxious Generation. critical thinking skills are down, attention spans are down, um polarization, tribalism, all of this came from not the uh malicious intent of these 20-year-olds who are working at Facebook, but the bad incentives um and

Speaker A

I I repeat this quote often, but I think it's so fundamental. The Charlie Mer quote, he was Warren Buffett's business partner. Yeah.

Speaker A

If you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. Yeah. Were the incentives of social media companies to make the world more open and connected or or to improve mental health of young people? No. Their incentives were maximizing how much

Speaker A

attention they get because the business model of advertising price share price. Share price is directly correlated to minutes spent, frequency of usage, duration of usage. So what you're going to get are of all imagine a spectrum of all the

Speaker A

ways you could design technology. And over here you've got a bunch of very thoughtful design decisions about, you know, keeping people helping people connect with their friends in real life with their families, hosting community groups, church groups, reading clubs,

Speaker A

sewing clubs, hiking groups. And you've got design of technology that is going to steer people back into that. Versus over here, you got a bunch of designs for social media that just keep people glued on screens by themselves with

Speaker A

their esophagus compressed, their neck extension, uh, you know, going like this and basically doom scrolling for eight hours a day. Which one of those two worlds, which one of those design choices is going to be better for shareholder price?

Speaker A

So, drinking water with electrolytes makes a huge difference. When you want to stay healthy and hydrated, you should do that. So, for the best option you can buy, we recommend Relight. Relight starts with unrefined sea salt, real salt, which is completely natural, zero

Speaker A

sugar, no artificial sweeteners, colors, flavors, and no chemical preservatives. The ingredient list is very short and you can actually pronounce everything on it without a degree in chemistry. If you start adding relight to your water, we believe you will feel different very

Speaker A

quickly, way better. No sluggishness or afternoon crash, just more energy, better workouts, all the benefits that come with true hydration. And Relight tastes awesome. Mango flavor, pina colada. Come on now. So, if you're ready to give Relight a try, visit

Speaker A

redmond.com/tucker. Use the code Tucker for 15% off your first order. redmond.com/tucker code tucker 15% off your first order or you can click the link in the video description or scan the QR code on your screen. So the point is first of all

Speaker A

there's actually a hidden optimism so discrediting of markets and of market theology. Well, it's about what are people what they want until they die.

Speaker A

Yeah. Well, the question is are are we giving them what they want or what they can't help but look at? Well, that's with an asymmetry of information where the designers at the tech companies know exactly how your your brain works and

Speaker A

they manipulate the design choices to keep you scrolling for as long as possible. So, this is all in the most people know me and our work through the Netflix documentary the social dilemma.

Speaker A

Yes. And we had, you know, a lot of the insiders coming out who said we know what this is doing to people. Um, and in that film it talks about the history where I I was at Stanford at at a lab or

Speaker A

part part of a class called the Stanford persuasive technology lab professor named BJ Fog and where engineers were taught how to do persuasion techniques that theoretically be things that are good like how would we persuade you to go to the gym more often and how would

Speaker A

technology play a positive role in getting you to go to the gym more often or you've got a sign up form and LinkedIn can put a progress bar in the top right saying hey you filled in this much of your LinkedIn profile but we

Speaker A

want you to come back and fill in more. So, we'll put a progress bar in the top right saying you filled in 60%. It sounds really stupid and dumb, but if you put a progress bar in the top right

Speaker A

hand corner, that actually is very persuasive in getting people to fill out the rest of it.

Speaker A

And most people don't think about this. If I put a uh a design feature in WhatsApp that says you were on last online, you know, 3 minutes ago, that changes the whole messaging environment. Suddenly, when you message people, you know that the other person

Speaker A

knows that you were online 3 minutes ago, which means you feel obligated to respond to them. Yes. because your public your your availability and onliness was visible and made transparent to someone else. But that was a design choice could have been

Speaker A

designed totally differently. We don't have to put a progress bar on the LinkedIn profile. We don't have to say you were last online 5 minutes ago and create social pressure. So the point is technology isn't destiny on its own. The

Speaker A

way we design it creates different societal outcomes. And because of the business model of maximizing attention and engagement, we got only the side of design choices that resulted in this, you know, more addicted, distracted, polarized, sexualized, screwed up,

Speaker A

doomscrolling, brained society that we are now living in when you go outside. And from my perspective in 2013, um, seeing those incentives, it was like, oh [ __ ] Yeah.

Speaker A

Because you could just see the trajectory before it happened in 2013. In 2013. Yeah. I mean, so I So, by the way, I I did the tech entrepreneurship thing. I raised venture capital. I'm a builder of technology. I understand the

Speaker A

kind of normal, you know, I did the Stanford entrepreneurship program, the same one that Sam Alman did, by the way, called the Mayfield Fellows program. So I I came up in a cohort of some of these people but I could see it from a

Speaker A

different angle and for the company that I started I was under this. Why were you able to see it?

Speaker A

Uh well I wasn't able to see it at first part part of it was actually I I relate to their the blind spots which is you've talked about this with your own work that when you have a sal you know you

Speaker A

can't something you can't question something that your salary depends on you not see up in Sinclair and it wasn't so much my salary but the business model being the kind of salary of the company. If the business model is

Speaker A

maximizing time and engagement, you come up ways to justify that that's a good thing. Right? And you can only have the ethics that you can afford underneath that perverse incentive. So you start to see things in terms of what's compatible

Speaker A

with those incentives. Oh, we are making the world more open and connected. Oh, small mediumsiz businesses, we're able to reach so many more people on Facebook and Instagram now. Think of all of the new revenue and customers that we're

Speaker A

generating because we're so good at routing attention. And it's not that those are false stories. It just hides the the shadow. There's almost like a yungian shadow, right, for technology.

Speaker A

Like yes, you created these things, but you also have this massive shadow of creating a societal catastrophe at the same time. And I think there's a tendency to try to do moral arithmetic of like, do the upsides minus the

Speaker A

downsides equal net positive. It's like this very simple moral arithmetic. And the answer is don't brain rot and destroy the culture of a population and create a dumpster fire of your politics, your tribalism, the mental health of a generation. Uh we

Speaker A

don't have to do that. And so the I guess the point here is um yeah, so I started this company. I was under the incentives of maximizing time and engagement. Actually, our business model is basically telling like a Washington

Speaker A

Post or a New York Times or The Economist or Fox News, we can increase the amount of time people spend on their website, but giving them more information without leaving the web page that they're on. That was essentially

Speaker A

the value proposition. It was like this widget that basically let you say, I want to learn more about that. Tell me more. And it would give multimedia and background information and voting records and videos and maps and all this

Speaker A

stuff on the page of Fox News without leaving Fox News. Right. So, sounds like a great proposition.

Speaker A

Definitely. But then the entire company became based on maximizing how much time people spent there. And so I myself was kind of in this inner conflict and I went through that. It's actually funny.

Speaker A

I I had a a group of friends um who also had small tech companies. We're all about the same age. We're probably like 27 28 only studied computer science.

Speaker A

Very reflective of the culture of the people there. And we had a thing called doubt club. And the point of doubt club like fight club is you can't talk about doubt club. And the point is that as a

Speaker A

founder of a tech company, you don't have a space where you can um essentially talk about your doubts about what you're doing. Is this even good for the world? So, we talked about our doubts about what we were building,

Speaker A

doubts about what this meant for our lives and doubts about whether we were actually doing a good thing.

Speaker A

And that led me to basically realize that we needed to let go of the company.

Speaker A

It got acquired by Google. And so I landed at Google uh through basically reckoning with the conflict of incentives that I was under. And then it was at Google that I saw how a much bigger ecosystem obviously the entire

Speaker A

all the social media platforms were under those same perverse incentives. So I think that gave me an early insight into how this would go wrong. And I tried to warn my colleagues at Google in a 2013 presentation saying, you know,

Speaker A

this small group of basically a hundred designers working at three companies are designing again the psychological environment for all of humanity. And if we don't get ahead of the incentives, this is going to create an arms race for

Speaker A

attention and engagement and design choices that will become a race to the bottom of the brain stem to psychologically manipulate human nature and then lead to accidentally this kind of brain rotted society. So that's how how did they respond when you said that?

Speaker A

So I made this uh this slide deck and um I sent it I I actually felt nervous making it because I was criticizing you know and it wasn't meant to be adversarial or claiming that Google was evil. I'm not like an attention-seeking

Speaker A

person. Um I wasn't trying to be angry at anybody. I was just naming a problem and I sent it to about 30 of my smartest friends at Google. Um and I thought surely other people were working on this. It's like Google's this

Speaker A

incredibly brilliant company with the smartest PhDs. Like they're going to say that's nice kid, but like we've got this handled. Like we thought about this problem. To my surprise, when I came back the next day after only sending it

Speaker A

to 30 people in the Google slides, you can see the number of simultaneous viewers on the top right hand corner of people looking at like a Google doc or a slide deck and there was 150 simultaneous viewers, but I only sent it

Speaker A

to 30 people. So what had happened is it it started getting spread virally throughout the whole company and soon there was thousands of simultaneous viewers and I learned that in the next day it had gone up to Larry Page who's

Speaker A

the co-founder of Google uh and there was like a meeting about it and so all this was to say that it was received in a way that I think people felt this is a real problem and I got emails from all

Speaker A

around the company like yeah we should do something about this this is a real thing we've got to manage and that's how I landed as a Google design ethicist.

Speaker A

uh studying how do you ethically design technology and that's what became kind of my core ethos in general of how do you do technology in a way that's compatible with the health well-being and flourishing of a society.

Speaker A

uh and watching in 2013 these bad incentives. It was like having um instead of like post-traumatic stress disorder, it was my my friends joke, it was like having pre-traumatic stress disorder because I saw where this was going. And

Speaker A

I think a lot of what motivates me in the conversation that I know we're going to have about AI is I don't want to see us make a total disaster again. and I've watched it happen. Well, here's some

Speaker A

good news in a sad time. Pre-born has saved over 50,000 babies this year alone. How'd they do that? Well, here's a direct quote from the president of Preborn. Because of you, we can invite mothers considering abortion into a

Speaker A

pre-born network clinic to meet their baby. And when she has that close encounter, she's 80% more likely to choose life.

Speaker A

That's true. And if it wasn't clear, you refers to you, to the thousands of Americans who support pre-born every day. Support from people empowers pre-born's life-saving work by making that first encounter between a mother and her baby possible. Once people have

Speaker A

the knowledge, they're much more likely to make the life affirming decision. Pre-born puts the gospel into action across this country, surrounding mothers with hope and love, not judgment, but hope and love and providing free life-saving ultrasounds. You can join

Speaker A

Pre-born as they work to rescue the next 50,000 babies. Just $28 sponsors an ultrasound and can help save a baby's life. So to do that, dell pound 250 and say the keyword baby. Pound 250 baby. Or you can give securely at

Speaker A

pre-born.com/tucker. pre-born.com/tucker. And gifts are taxdeductible. So, of the other members of Doubt Club, how many are still in the business you were in when you were None of them. They're all They're all doing other things now.

Speaker A

Really? Yeah. Which is to say, once you reckon with something, you know, you can only have the ethics you can afford. So, you find a different way. You find a different business model.

Speaker A

Um, and people hearing that might say, "Oh, therefore, now your business model is warning people about technology and doing speaking engagements." I just want to be clear for the record. I don't make money from speaking engagements. All the

Speaker A

money goes into our nonprofit. I don't actually give speaking engagements very often. I just care about and have for the last 10 years with our nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology. Think about how do you do design for

Speaker A

technology in a positive and ethical way? How do you change the incentives? How do you do policy and litigation that changes the incentives? like the meta lawsuit of $17 billion that happened just 3 4 weeks ago that was catalyzed by a bunch of the

Speaker A

attorney general attorneys general watching the social dilemma in 2021. So I've seen how if you have dedicated advocacy if you if you show people the nature of a problem there can be a response. Now that one took way too long

Speaker A

and way too late but I think that now with AI it's happening exponentially faster. I mean, a million times faster because AI is different from other technologies because it accelerates its own progress.

Speaker A

Um, we should probably just say why that's true. So, like if I invent a nuclear weapon, I did the nuclear physics, I assembled the thing together, I've got the uranium, plutonium, blah blah blah, I create the thing. But once

Speaker A

I build a nuke, it doesn't accelerate or invent better versions of nuclear weapons. No, it doesn't do that.

Speaker A

Doesn't just like last time spontaneously create a hydrogen bomb. No. No. But if I'm inventing intelligence, meaning the ability to do pattern recognition, goal achieving training on all human language, I can use that intelligence to take the code that trained AI and make it way

Speaker A

more efficient. I can take the intelligence I've created and say point it at chip design and say take this chip design and make it more efficient. And it does that. So now you have a more efficient chip design, more

Speaker A

efficient code, training the next more powerful version of AI and then that next more powerful version and it becomes exponential.

Speaker A

So the way to say is nukes don't make better nukes but AI makes better faster more crazy AI which means that you're actually in the words of one of the open AI founders Greg Brockman who at a conference once

Speaker A

told me AI is like a double exponential because it's an exponential that exponentiates exactly itself. It's not a mathematical term, but it's a metaphor for people to think about.

Speaker A

Um, just really quickly, just to linger a minute on your tenure at Google. So, what you became an ethicist, they promoted you to this job.

Speaker A

Well, so I thought I was going to get fired or there was a chance I would get fired from this letter even though it wasn't adversarial. I didn't know what happened. And just to say to Google's credit, um rather than that, um I

Speaker A

basically said I wanted to work on this problem and I I I thought there were opportunities within Google to change the design of Android, the operating system running on half the world's phones, uh and to change the design of

Speaker A

Google Chrome, which is a web browser running on most people's computers. And if you change those two product surfaces, you could have a pretty big difference on the attention economy. So instead of leaving, I thought, well, maybe I can stay and work on that

Speaker A

research. But if you were to succeed in that mission, you would make the company less profitable.

Speaker A

Correct. And so like how could that ever succeed? Well, and this is where I was naive. So I had a second round of naive where I thought that maybe if I was just really persuasive, I could talk to the people

Speaker A

running those products and I did. I had lots of meetings with the people. I bet you do.

Speaker A

I spent three years trying to change Google from the inside. But I mean it that was incredibly naive of me and and that's why I left and why for the last 10 years you know I have I mean I don't get

Speaker A

sleep. I don't have much of a life I I really focus on these issues because I see how big they are and how consequential they are and how irreversible in many ways and senses they are if you don't get it right ahead of time. And so

Speaker A

a lot of what drives me is how do we make sure the technology to the degree it's eating the world per Mark Andre.

Speaker A

Mark Andre the famous founder of Netscape who I know you know said in 2009 software is eating the world but we don't regulate software. So when software eats the world it's like deregulating or sort of taking away not

Speaker A

that regulations are always good but it's sort of reconstituting that part of society. Well, so the idea in the United in the west, I think, but is that markets are self-correcting, right?

Speaker A

And that if left untampered with, they will always reach a place of goodness. And when you're just selling a product and the features of the products harms are part of what consumers value, and if I don't like that product that's causing

Speaker A

harm, I'll use this other product that's not, that works. And markets are great for that. They're the most incredible tool. But they don't deal with problems of monopolies. So if I have a metaf monopoly, meaning um you know metaf's

Speaker A

law is basically the power of something grows with the exponent of the network. So social media was a metaf monopoly.

Speaker A

Uber is a metaf monopoly. Once I get all the drivers on Uber, it's going to be hard to switch to another that doesn't have as many cars on it, doesn't have any drivers on it. So I'm going to use

Speaker A

the one app that has all of them on it. I'm going to use the one social network that has everybody on it. And I can't just switch from one social network I don't like that's doing things in a

Speaker A

toxic way to another one that's doing things in a non-toxic way. And in fact, if I build a social network that doesn't do attention hijacking, race to the bottom of the brain stem, manipulative design, people aren't going to use it

Speaker A

very well. Exactly. Right. And there's been a lot of people's attempts to try to create alternate social media and then when you go on there, it's a ghost town. There's no one there.

Speaker A

So, I think what you're saying is when the product works well, it destroys people. Well, and the only way to keep it from destroying people is to work less well, less less efficiently. or you have standards written from above that

Speaker A

say hey no one can do this manipulative design right and that's how we could have prevent you know I've met so many I was just at a conference two weeks ago um called the prohuman uh assembly and we'll talk about it is the prohuman

Speaker A

movement I think is the frame for like how do we have a humanistic future with technology and I met for the first time actually some cases for the first time I sent emails back and forth with them but

Speaker A

several of the parents who have lost um lost their from from from this stuff and um uh you know when you when you meet parents who've lost suicide uh well to bullying to um you know there was a filter on Snapchat called a YOLO

Speaker A

filter that basically overlaid on the video you were posting the number of miles per hour that you're going and so they basically created a filter that incentivizes people to take videos at a high miles per hour actually.

Speaker A

Yeah. Yeah. um you know or Snapchat streaks where they attach you know the streak method of like oh you worked out the gym four days in a row if you work out tomorrow it'll be five days in a um and then once

Speaker A

you have 300 days in a row it's really hard to be taking a break from the 300 days in a row that you've done that activity so that's a persuasive design feature but what if I do that to a

Speaker A

12year-old who's communicating with their best friend so I've got a 12-year-old or even a 10-year-old they're just chatting text messaging with their friend and they've been communicating for 300 days. Now they literally can't get off the app because

Speaker A

every single day they've got to send them a message or they lose this thing.

Speaker A

And it's just like, you know, cigarette companies would use cartoon characters to addict kids, that was a very minor form of persuasion. Um, but using Snapchat streaks on 11-year-olds is very persuasive. Um, and so everything from cyber bullying to

Speaker A

there's just a million ways that it happens. Um, you know, when you meet when you meet the parents, it's like and you just no, you're not allowed to do that. You're not allowed to [ __ ] up young kids and families. Uh,

Speaker A

and so I think a lot of this for me is a protective instinct of in seeing real consequences for real people and watching society get totally distorted and watching culture and tribalism and politics just get off the rails which are largely amplified by

Speaker A

social media. Um, in watching all that it's like I never again, right? You go through a catastrophe, you make sure it doesn't happen again. Owning a home has always been the core of the American dream. It's the asset that families work

Speaker A

their lives to build, place of stability, security, and actual wealth. But too many homeowners right now are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries, paying a survival tax of 20% interest or more. So, we're against debt. We always say that, but you can't

Speaker A

buy a house without debt right now. Almost anybody has to take out a loan.

Speaker A

So, the question is, who you going to get a loan from? Why are you handing your money to big banks when you can keep it for your family? Our friends at American Financing have a better way.

Speaker A

They're helping homeowners tap into their hard-earned equity. They're supporting Americans looking to fulfill the American dream of owning a home.

Speaker A

American Financing saves its customers an average of 800 bucks a month. That's nearly $10,000 a year. It's not just a loan. It's a total financial reset. And so, American Financing is worth looking at. They're called America's home for

Speaker A

home loans for a reason. Find out more at 800685-55696. 800685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net/tucker. You said that even pretty recently you weren't as worried about AI's progression as you are now.

Speaker A

Yeah. Well, so to be clear, no, I I've been worried about AI for the last three years and I'll I'll briefly explain. So um I had been very busy on the social media topic y for seven years. You make any

Speaker A

way at all by the way? Well I mean the social dilemma was seen by something like 100 million plus people in 190 countries in 30 languages.

Speaker A

It's the most popular documentary on Netflix for several years. Um and the attorneys general watched it and it helped amplify and create this this lawsuit for that just finished just a week ago. I mean, a month ago for $17

Speaker A

billion on Meta and they're going to change some of their design practices for kids. And it's a lot of too little too late. And frankly, the fine should be trillions of dollars. Even Mike Milin, the the venture capitalist, I

Speaker A

mean, the great capitalist, says that if you accounted for all the harms of social media, it would be multiple trillions of dollars of damage to of social capital to the social fabric.

Speaker A

That's the actual price of this thing um from the toxic design patterns. Um, and so, you know, we did get employee activism inside the companies. We did see Francis Hogan, the Facebook whistleblower, come out. There's a movie about her that just came out this last

Speaker A

week called The Social Reckoning. Um, you know, she leaked 10,000 pages of Facebook research documents showing that they knew just like the tobacco companies that it was making kids making body images uh issues worse for one out of three girls driving mental health

Speaker A

problems. Um, and due to her bravery, we now have these lawsuits that are underway and some that have completed that are shifting some of that. But in many ways, we're just it was very late.

Speaker A

And so it was very difficult working on that for so long without a lot of traction even though it was the right thing to do.

Speaker A

Um, with AI, the reason we switched into it is in 2023, uh, I got phone calls from people inside of AI labs and I had known about OpenAI.

Speaker A

I'd known about, you know, a couple of the AI companies and knowing that they were making some progress. I'd see Elon's tweets and Sam Alman's tweets saying like people aren't ready for this. Like there's some real stuff coming. But it wasn't until like January

Speaker A

of 2023 and I got a call and the person said basically you need to stop what you're doing and completely pivot and switch to waking up the world to AI because I have seen jumps in capabilities. This is when GPT4

Speaker A

was coming out. This is open AI's chat GPT4. Um that are going to stun people and the institutions aren't ready. And so basically because we'd had all the success with the social dilemma, we had we had you know a lot of connections

Speaker A

between national security, governments, um culture and so we basically did this presentation called the AI dilemma um and woke up the institutions. It was like getting a phone call from the Robert Oppenheimer's of the world. So imagine you're getting a phone call in

Speaker A

1942 and from this thing called the Manhattan Project and this physicist says no we're inventing something that's totally different. and you're like, "But don't we already have bombs?" Like, we we are you don't really understand how significant something's going to be. And

Speaker A

so, you get a phone call from that person who's saying, "No, no, no. This is a different kind of thing." And it was getting that phone call that I realized that there was a whole bunch of risks that our society was was going to

Speaker A

face because of this arms race dynamic. And that's what they basically said is the corporate race between these major AI labs, Open AAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepMind, um the race is out of control.

Speaker A

everyone's badly incentivized. You have to help wake up the world. And so that's when we switched to AI.

Speaker A

The race, so the race, as you said at the outset, is not simply between the American companies developing this technology, but between the US and something called China, right?

Speaker A

Um, my instinct is that that's well, my instinct is that we're probably not going to be China no matter what we're telling ourselves. But leaving that aside, my instinct is that that's less real than they're saying. But you tell

Speaker A

me. Well, it's funny. I haven't shared this publicly, but I have heard a story. So, it's you're not going to be able to trust me cuz I'm not sharing who it's from, but I heard a story from someone

Speaker A

who was in the know that was in the government. I think it was they said it was 2015 or 2016, and it was one of the major AI labs. So this person said, um, "China is building an AGI project and

Speaker A

the US has to build one." And then years later, this person ran into this person and said, "How did you know that China was building an AGI project?" And the person flat out replied, "Uh, I didn't.

Speaker A

I just wanted to tell you as government that so they would fund us with a bunch of money." And do they get the funding?

Speaker A

I don't know actually. That's but the point is that they have been stoking the fear of China from the very beginning even when there wasn't you got to have a you've got to pay double for water and energy because you

Speaker A

need a data center in your town because China That's right. Exactly. You got to screw up your property values. You got to have noise pollution. Give everybody like extra, you know, water pollution, you know cancer etc.

Speaker A

Because of China. Yeah. And by the way, your tax dollars in many cases are subsidizing that data center which is going to replace your job. So you're 100%. I don't think there's a data center in the United States that doesn't

Speaker A

take tax dollars. Yeah. And I think when people see that data center, by the way, it's like you should see a big box that's designed to take your job.

Speaker A

Yeah. It's designed to create competitive capabilities of, you know, if you're worried about immigrants crossing the border, AI represents like millions of new digital immigrants that are going to be better not just at the regular work in our economy, but the

Speaker A

most premium sort of well-trained cognitive work in our economy, programmers, lawyers, uh, across the board. And then eventually robots that will be able to do physical labor. And so if you're worried about that, you should be worried about the trajectory

Speaker A

of AI being designed explicitly to replace your job. Because the companies will say, "We're just giving you a chatbot. It's a blinking cursor. It's like a tool that tells you, hey, why is my washing machine broken?" And boom,

Speaker A

you get the answer. Why is my kid burping? Boom, you get the answer. It's helpful. That tool is helpful. But is that what their business models? Back to Charlie Mer. What are the AI company's incentives? Think about the bill

Speaker A

hundreds of billions of dollars that have been raised. Is there incentive to capture $20 a month from every person, which is how much it costs for a chatbt subscription, or is the thing that's going to pay back those hundreds of

Speaker A

billions of dollars to capture everyone's salary from everyone's job in the future? Well, of course, the latter.

Speaker A

Of course, the latter. So, it's a race to replace human labor, not a race chatbot companies.

Speaker A

These are not chatbot companies. That's just a veneer to provide an early tool. While the real race is to build these godlike digital brains that are able at doing everything at a superhuman level and out compete us in programming, law,

Speaker A

biology, science, physical labor, military strategy, planning, like everything. But so okay, I should just say my bias. Yeah. which is based on a lot of knowledge and experience, which is the people who run our c country are really stupid despite their credentials.

Speaker A

So, it's possible they haven't thought this through. But it's so obvious that when you do that, you're going to get a violent reaction from the population. If you take the jobs of factory workers, you get opioid abuse. If you take the

Speaker A

jobs of lawyers, you get revolution. Okay? Right? the knowledge economy workers don't want their jobs taken and they have high expectations and they have low self-control. So, you're going to have some kind of violent response.

Speaker A

That's right. What's their plan for that? Well, first of all, and it's important to note they're selling a story that this is going to be good for everybody. GDP growth is going to go up. It's going to be the most prosperous new golden age

Speaker A

growth. This is like what happened and you've you've spoken about this extensively just that they promised us a story with globalization that will outsource our jobs to in manufacturing to these other countries but it'll make us so abundant cuz we'll have cheap

Speaker A

goods coming in where labor is so much cheaper and the it's going to benefit everybody. And how did that story work out?

Speaker A

You won't get a million people living on the streets of major American cities smoking meth.

Speaker A

Oh wait oh you did. Okay. Right. Exactly. And so a meme here is like Detroit everywhere or you know you know these places everywhere. Right. And so um but the working class will is will put up with it.

Speaker A

Yeah. But it's kind of a devil's bargain. The white collar class will not put up with it. They'll go crazy.

Speaker A

Well, this this is an important point. So while the factory workers and manufacturing workers, you know, were further away from Washington DC and New York and the political class.

Speaker A

Exactly. But this time around, to your point, you have lawyers who are going to be affected and they are very close to the political class.

Speaker A

Exactly. There's also a bigger drop, right? So, instead of going from, I don't know, $80,000 a year to $35,000 a year or something like that, you're going from I took out student a student debt, $200,000, $100,000 of student

Speaker A

loans, and I'm going from my job of $250,000 a year as a lawyer to now, whoops, what am I doing? Doing some other kind of cognitive work. Now, people will always say, but look, if Mark Andre was at this table, he'd say,

Speaker A

look, uh, we've always worried about automation. Economists have have named this phenomenon all the time. New technologies come along, agriculture, you know, 200 years ago, all of us were farmers. Now almost no one's a farmer.

Speaker A

We always find something new to do. What's different about AI? What's different about it? It's that AI is built to be able to do all forms of cognitive labor like lawyers, programmers, you know, factory workers, everything, robots, it it does

Speaker A

everything. And for whatever it doesn't do yet, that just becomes the next incentive Charlie Munger style to go train in that field. Like I have you seen the um these hand farms in India, arm farms. Have you seen this?

Speaker A

No. So this is it was both a popular job in LA about 6 months ago and also all throughout India. It was essentially an economy where you strap a GoPro camera to your head and you look down and you

Speaker A

do tasks, you sew things, you clean dishes. So you're basically training. You have this essentially the number one job is training your replacement.

Speaker A

It's kind of nice to see Indians training their own replacements. Well, sorry, excuse me. It's it's my immigration joke. Um, I guess the difference is though, and I've had this conversation with a number of people involved in this transition,

Speaker A

and they will say exactly what you just said, which is we've been through this before.

Speaker A

We always figure it out. The agricultural economy. Exactly. It It's going to turn out great because it always does.

Speaker A

But the difference here is that the people whose jobs are being replaced imbue their jobs with meaning. And those so if I'm working a metal stamping machine, I don't think that what I'm doing is saving the world. I'm doing it

Speaker A

to pay for my bass boat in my life outside work. But if I'm a nonprofit executive, I really feel like what I'm doing is inherently important and my identity is wrapped up in what I'm doing. So the promise of more idle time

Speaker A

is hell. Well, also where are you going to get your future income? But leaving the income aside, even if we have, you know, guaranteed basic income or whatever, there's like the welfare state becomes, you know, the the only source of income

Speaker A

and it's generous, it's still doesn't make up for the meaning. Correct. My identity has been lost.

Speaker A

Identity, dignity, and that's when I become a revolutionary. Exactly. Yeah. Most people don't like thinking about life insurance. It's one of those topics you tend to kind of put off. But if you're married, you've got kids, you've got people who depend on you, you

Speaker A

probably should think about what would happen if you weren't around. And that's why we've partnered with Ethos. They've made getting life insurance super easy.

Speaker A

You can do the whole thing online. You don't have to sit down with an agent or go through a medical exam. You get a quote in seconds, apply in just a few minutes, and in some cases, you get

Speaker A

coverage the same day. You just answer a couple of simple health questions. You get up to $3 million in coverage. Some policies can be yours for as little as 30 bucks a month. So, it's a good deal.

Speaker A

If you've been putting off life insurance because you thought it would be a very complicated, expensive process, you should probably check out Ethos. Take a couple of minutes, get your free quote online at ethos.com/tucker.

Speaker A

Ethos is ethos.com/tucker. Application times obviously vary as do rates, but we think it's pretty good.

Speaker A

So, what's their plan for that? They Handwave, as you've probably noticed, they don't have a plan. And by the way, you might say, Yeah. Yeah. Well, and and so they'll say, "But if we don't do it, China will." But right now, does the does US

Speaker A

and China are racing to mutually assured political revolution right now because they have the same problem. They have a population decline problem. So, they need to fill in the population decline with more robots. So, they think they can manage it that way. But we have a

Speaker A

shared interest in the way I think about AI is it's like taking steroids that also give you cancer. So, let me explain that. I take some GPT6. I put it in my mouth as a country. Now my whole country

Speaker A

is running on GPT6. So I just buffed up my muscles. I've got suddenly super programmers. I've got super military strategists. I've got super GDP growth because I've automated stuff with robots. So my external muscles like the GDP is like an external muscle of the US

Speaker A

economy. That all got bigger. But at the cost of cancering identity work, meaning the social fabric, right? It's a it's a devil's trade. I think the the theme here is what does the devil do? They they come up to you and say, "I've got

Speaker A

this great deal for you. It's going to be great. You're going to look great.

Speaker A

You're going to feel great. It's everything's going to be." And the other side of that trade is something you don't want. Do they actually think since you've I mean, you do this for a living.

Speaker A

You talk to these people for a living. Do they think that GDP is like a the most meaningful measure of a society's health?

Speaker A

I don't think they're thinking through it. I think there's a there's a thing where it's persuasive to say it because in the past GDP growth going up at least like through the '90s or something like that meant generally speaking more

Speaker A

prosperity for our society. Anyone who uses the term GDP is instantly written off in my head as a [ __ ] Right. Well, even the like I won't even listen to someone who cites GD GDP. I know it's stupid. Well, but so there is

Speaker A

a geopolitical thing which is that economic growth precedes geopolitical power. So if I've got a bigger economic growth machine, then I will be able to dominate other countries that don't. And so I think it's a power-seeking thing that is using as propaganda GDP growth

Speaker A

to make it sound like this is going to be good because you know through the ' 60s7s '80s '90s GDP growth going up was associated with more prosperity for the economy. Actually up until the 1970s as we as we know when when things changed.

Speaker A

Um but it's not even an accurate measure of economic power. No. And even the the guidance measure was it Simon Knitz? Am I remember? No.

Speaker A

Who's the one who came up with the GDP metric? He said don't use this. He said don't use this to measure prosperity of a country.

Speaker A

This is just a a simple metric. It's one thing you can use. You never optimize for it. We were talking at breakfast about how you made such you made such a smart point that I tried to memorize it.

Speaker A

But you we're talking about how basically our ruling class is inadequate to managing our society. And it's not just true in our country, but true in many Western countries. And you said that is a product of optimizing for one

Speaker A

quality. Yes. But but you explain it because you better I mean I think so you you on your show have talked about a lot of these topics whether it's um why do we have morons running everything? Why do we have big

Speaker A

box stores and the removal of aesthetics of everything? Um and what it all comes down to is if I'm optimizing for a metric like I just want the cheapest goods everywhere.

Speaker A

Well, then suddenly I just outsourced all my manufacturing to the other countries, right? Including, by the way, my national security, critical minerals, and all this stuff that you wake up later and say, "Why did I do that?" But

Speaker A

it was for the cheapest price. So, you weren't thinking through it in a multi-dimensional way. Yes.

Speaker A

If I optimize for SAT scores, I get this like super smart, narrow, disembodied, brilliant like quality of like these very specifically domesticated humans, but at the expense of all the other kinds of intelligence and sort of humanity and and all that.

Speaker A

And really what that optimizes for and wisdom. Absolutely. If I optimize for like the cheapest use of 3D space, then I get big box stores that optimize revenue per square inch of of you know unit uh 3D space. Uh and I and that the

Speaker A

removal of aesthetics in the soul of a city. If I take a city like Sedona, Arizona, I remember visiting there during the pandemic where they had a problem where so much of the uh real estate was actually just Airbnbs. So it's like a

Speaker A

ghost town where essentially every to optimize the the the revenue in the in the city is everybody's just making money from from renting their places and all of a sudden no one lives there and all no one lives there. So no one

Speaker A

and there's a famous quote from Larry Summers like does anybody ever washed a a rental car?

Speaker A

Right? Like meaning that if you don't have a skin in the game, if you don't have a stake in the city, in the parks, in the schools and the libraries and the churches in the in the local community,

Speaker A

in the fabric, you're kind of it's the vampirification of everything. It's like the big boxification of everything. And so I think that to sort of you know something you've talked about a lot is the kind of spiritual disease that we're

Speaker A

seeing which comes from this narrow optimization for one metric at the expense of the whole and that includes GDP right and so if we want a rich society other countries are better at managing this right now than the US

Speaker A

where you protect the sort of fundamentals of a society the community the trust the intergenerational wisdom and knowledge transmission um you know you invest in the arts and and culture and education healthare etc. But AI is like we're actually talking uh about

Speaker A

this that this this Nick Lan quote that we'll maybe get into. If we just value competition and growth of a narrow metric, then it's like we are summoning AI from the future into the present. We are assembling the things that will make

Speaker A

everything more efficient through AI because AI represents I can do everything more efficiently than everything else. That's what it represents.

Speaker A

And there's a great quote by by Nick Land um who wrote an essay called what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence space that must assemble itself entirely

Speaker A

from the enemy's resources. Like essentially we are assembling the tool the machines that are being designed to replace and dehumanize and disempower our own humanity. We're selling the hangman the rope.

Speaker A

That's right. You know, our the future job is coffin builders. I'm bu my job is to train the AI that's going to replace my job.

Speaker A

Now, I'm not saying this, by the way, people are going to say, "Okay, you're a doomer. You're a dark person. You're trying to sell fear." That's not what this is about. This is about if you're the doomer. Did you Did you create this

Speaker A

technology? I don't think so. No. And if you say, "I'm trying to make money from it." Think about the trillions of dollars that the people advancing the transfer. It's like it's always like if you I I catch you in the

Speaker A

act of raping someone and I'm like stop and you're like shut up you sexist. It's like wait what? No no no I'm not the criminal.

Speaker A

Exactly. Exactly. You're the doomer. Really? Well and so you you know you have someone like Nate Sores on your podcast or you have me on or you have people who have a sincere care for the future and all you're doing is saying we have

Speaker A

to see clearly. You know, there's a great quote by Charles Kettering. A problem wellstated is a problem half-solved.

Speaker A

Yeah, that is I believe that and and you know, Einstein said that um if I was given a problem, I'd spend 95% of the time defining the problem and then 5% solving it.

Speaker A

So, one of the drivers of our problems is this optimization for narrow metrics. Like Facebook maximizing this narrow metric of time spent sounded like, oh, we're giving more people what they want because otherwise why would they be spending time there? But in the

Speaker A

meantime, you've created cyber bullying, body dysmorphia, dyslexia, like brain rot, you know, you you destroyed a generation all while the number was going up. Well, there's also a thing called addiction, right? Exactly.

Speaker A

Which tends to act against something called free will. Exactly. I mean, it's like Yeah. Exactly.

Speaker A

This is why there is a wisdom gap above all in the west. Like people are not thinking wisely.

Speaker A

Correct. They're thinking in the way that an industrial designer thinks like I need to build a machine that makes bumpers and they're being domesticated to think in that way because the system profits from people who think in terms

Speaker A

of the system as it exists. Yeah. In terms of narrow specialties totally disconnected from the whole.

Speaker A

That's exactly right. And and that's what it is. It's like narrow specialties disconnected from the whole. Like there's a hole of what makes a social fabric healthy. There's a hole for what makes forget climate change just like a

Speaker A

healthy environment. you have to have all these other features and and it's like if you're optimizing for uh you know the eggs don't stick to the pan then you make teflon and but you didn't realize you're also creating

Speaker A

forever chemicals that give everybody in childhood cancers uh and now the sperm doesn't stick to the egg.

Speaker A

Yeah. The the good news is it's easier to clean your pan. The bad news is the eggs are poison.

Speaker A

That's right. Right. The eggs are poison and your sperm doesn't stick to the egg.

Speaker A

Sorry. I'm just It's all so absurd. It just makes me laugh. Well, and and it's it's really like disheartening and depressing, but there's, as we talked about off camera this morning, um there's something called there's a framework I really like

Speaker A

from a mentor of mine that um there's pre-tragic optimism, which is like I'm going to kind of I want to be an optimistic person, but that's like essentially a commitment without evidence. Like I just I need to be

Speaker A

optimistic. That's like totally that's that's how you know I'm better off being optimistic. It's almost like a neurosis actually.

Speaker A

Yeah, exactly. And it's a kind of denialist neurosis. It's 100%. It's like it's a nervous giggle. It's a nervous giggle. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker A

And you kind of stay optimistic cuz you just feel committed to that. And also there's like a partial truth there which is like it's better to live your life from a from aing place.

Speaker A

But if the cost of that optimism is being in denial of reality where the balance sheet of risks is growing exponentially, yeah, that's not a helpful form of optimism.

Speaker A

Well, you probably have heard that diesel prices have gotten so high that G7 nations had to release fuel from strategic reserves to get cost under control. And still some pumps are readjusting so they can get to $10 per

Speaker A

gallon. Governments across the world are trying to keep costs down, but they are running out of options because they're running out of money. The world is unstable.

Speaker A

That is the sad truth. And people in charge cannot control even the most basic questions like what is energy cost anymore. The war in Iran is raging. It's not coming to an end soon. Neither is the war in Ukraine. So could we get a

Speaker A

big recession soon? Yeah, of course we could. So, it's smart to think ahead now and imagine how you can take matters into your own hands to protect your savings and your family. And that's why smart investors everywhere, very much

Speaker A

including central banks around the world and very much including China, are stocking up on gold, physical gold, right now. Gold is not just a store of value for all of human history. It's also proven to be a strong investment.

Speaker A

It's outperformed the S&P 500 since 9/11. Over the past 25 years, gold has outperformed the standard and pores average. Gold is down from its historic high earlier this year, more than a thousand bucks. But major institutions predict the spot price will hit another

Speaker A

high by Q2 of next year, 2027. So if you're thinking about buying gold, right now is the time to buy. And people are buying. We founded Battalion Metals to give you a chance to buy fairly priced gold. This is not a scam. Our margins

Speaker A

are small, 3%. But the point is, we're not ripping anybody off, unlike a lot of places you buy gold because we actually believe in gold and we use the service ourselves. Protect your savings and fortify your future. Explore our

Speaker A

collection at battalion metals.com/tucker. battalion metals.com/tucker. No. And I just I've always noticed my whole life the wisest, most centered, balanced people I know laugh a lot. And a lot of what they laugh at is just the enduring absurdity of people, which is

Speaker A

literally enduring. It's just it's innate in people. They're absurd. They can't see. None of us can see the big picture. None of us know what happens after we die. Like we're operating in the dark.

Speaker A

And if you fully understand that, that's right. You're amused by it because it never corrects. And like it's so important to have that perspective. Otherwise, you become self-s serious and myopic. You be you become what you're describing.

Speaker A

And I've just got to say, I noticed that very few Silicon Valley people I know have that sense of humor at all. They really believe that they're gods in charge of shaping the future.

Speaker A

Yeah. And they don't know how absurd they are. Have you noticed this? Yeah. I mean, I we should get into the whole transhumanism god complex part of this, too. Because when you talk to in the Charlie Munger sense, like what's

Speaker A

the incentive here? You might just say, "Oh, the incentive is just like profit. Like these AI companies are trying to make money." But you're pointing to a deeper thing which is it's basically build a god, own the world economy and

Speaker A

make trillions of dollars like and and basically build the most intelligent entity that has ever existed, right?

Speaker A

Like they're building a machine. So just just in the last few weeks um AI solved a mathematics problem that had mill had a million dollar prize associated the millennium prize, excuse me, the Navier Stokes equation and my understanding is I think if I get

Speaker A

this right so that is confirmed AI did solve it. Yeah. I mean, normally it takes um 2 years to confirm it, but I believe they use a formal other system to kind of verify it very quickly. And I they think

Speaker A

they've solved it. And I believe they took 10,000 AI agents. Imagine a swarm, not the one that hacked hugging face, but a swarm of agents that are just solving math. And they worked for 88 hours and I believe

Speaker A

it cost, if I get the number right, I think it was $6.5 million to basically have this swarm of AIS solve unprecedented math.

Speaker A

6.5 million in energy costs. Uh yeah, in like the what's called the token cost.

Speaker A

Basically running the AI model for that long, for 88 hours with that many agents took I think $6.5 million.

Speaker A

And um so imagine you've built a machine that is literally like an oracle and you push a button and you wait for a little while and it just came up with new materials that no human has ever come up

Speaker A

with. It just came up with new math proofs that no one's ever come up with.

Speaker A

It just came up with new theoretical physics that no one has ever come up with. And imagine I hit a button and say, "How would you apply those new innovations to new products?" go literally think about that for another

Speaker A

thousand hours and then it comes up with new products and new ideas of what it could actually build and then now actually say what would you need to make those products go start a lawy you know do the automated IP filing start an LLC

Speaker A

start like it's people don't understand what we're really building here Tucker this is like you are building the automation of intelligence you could start automated companies with all these new insights you could generate all this new 21st century science the um a friend

Speaker A

of ours at Jay Kotra who actually happened to also to be the lead author on this hugging face incident investigation said to me once 4 years ago before she did this hugging face investigation. She said AI is like 24th

Speaker A

century technology crashing down on a 21st century society and and that sounds like hyperbole and exaggeration and embellishment and hyping the capabilities but AI is doing those things. And I just need to say and with all respect to the many different

Speaker A

voices out there that are trying to make sense of AI, there is one community that has been saying that these capabilities were going to scale and there's a lot of people who are saying rightly like this isn't going to happen. This is all hype

Speaker A

but it just keeps happening and the people building it. I was just at a conference the last 3 days in the Bay Area. I was with all the people in AI and they very much believe that that this is going to keep getting better

Speaker A

because if you can scale at least the thinking time. So imagine a person just thinks there for um a million lifetimes long. How much work would you accomplish if you could think for a million lifetimes of time? You could you could

Speaker A

invent a lot. What if I could get more data centers where I'm going from a million lifetimes of thinking and compute to a 100 million, you know, thinking hours, right? People don't understand what you could do with that.

Speaker A

And also the the thing that's doing the thinking is also getting better every year. So like the AI that's for that's thinking for that long is also getting more powerful.

Speaker A

Yes. And two years ago um the AIs weren't that good at you know weren't doing novel things in cyber security but as of just 6 months ago as Nate Sores said recently I like the way he said it like

Speaker A

6 months ago there was essentially two entities that could hack into your phone without you clicking on a a link. It was like MSAD and the NSA. And 6 months ago when Claude Mythos came out, suddenly there was three entities that could do

Speaker A

that. You have an AI system called Mythos came out in I think February that can find zero day vulnerabilities, meaning back doors vulnerabilities in any system, including according to Senator Mark Warner, who's chair ranking member of the Senate Intelligence

Speaker A

Committee, was able to find vulnerabilities in our classified systems. Yeah. Good. I hope they'll and I and I hope Claude Mythos will declassify and release all that stuff as sort of like a the Wikileaks that we were promised.

Speaker A

Well, there's there's a lot of different values. No, no, well, there's there's different things here. So, one is like, can we have more accountability for wars that happen that no one talked about and actually hold people accountable for

Speaker A

that? Yes, maybe some of that stuff. Absolutely. Then there's the other side which is like if we release nuclear secrets to the entire world because some criminal group maybe wants to go hack into that that's a really dangerous

Speaker A

thing or can we launch other nations nuclear weapons against their will by hacking in well so this is the interesting thing also so the US is about to spend I think it's $1.7 trillion starting in 2017 the Trump administration I think signed it

Speaker A

right to upgrade the nuclear arsenal that's correct right and they're going to do it over a decade except this time around so why are they doing this because the nukes are uh of the old system like there's the air gapped like it's running the old

Speaker A

the old way which is built in the you know 50s to the to the ' 80s '90s etc really to the 80s right and the new system this time around they're going to be digitally they're actually going to

Speaker A

be connected to modern networking infrastructure so if you have suddenly super hackers that are only getting exponentially better at cyber hacking from AI at the same time that you're digitally networking your nuclear weapons I don't have to complete that story for

Speaker A

you. It's a dangerous equation. I was actually I was actually at the Vatican nuclear weapons conference times AI. It was a the Vatican held an event for Nobel laureates and um and people who work on the nuclear nuclear topic

Speaker A

combined with people who work on AI because there's a new set of risks. The obvious one being if you have an AI doing nuclear command and control. So you have the AI that's deciding the launch decisions. That's the obvious

Speaker A

one. But then there's the other ones of if I'm now digitally networking my nuclear weapons and I suddenly have an AI that can turn off your nukes or do the opposite. That's don't have to say more a very unsafe world.

Speaker A

Does anyone see the core problem which is they're trying to they're trying to cure the disease with the poison that caused it. They're trying to smoke away the lung cancer. I mean technology Exactly. Right.

Speaker A

is the problem. Exactly. And then they want to solve it with more technology. And their answer is, well, the best way to defend against a super AI cyber weapon is to build another AI cyber weapon that we distribute to everybody that they can

Speaker A

use to patch their Exactly. That's what I'm saying. That's like that's why Yeah. Like dumb people in charge is the core problem. Like no one can think critically. Like wait a second, how did we network your nuclear arsenal? Like who

Speaker A

would even say something like that? Well, and it's interesting because it might not have seemed like too dumb of an idea before uh like it's just a way of modernizing your nuclear forces, but suddenly you didn't foresee that there would be AI

Speaker A

superhackers that know how to find vulnerabilities in everything. Now, people might think I'm hyping this, but let me give you another example.

Speaker A

So, Apple, if you're running an iPhone 17, I believe and above, uh or a MacBook, I think it's an M5 or above, these are the chips. Basically, the chips have a new thing called the memory, MEI memory, uh enhanced

Speaker A

integrity or something like that. Um, it's a new hardwarebased system to do protected memory. So, that basically it's harder for a cyber hacker to hack your phone or to hack your computer. So, they spent several years and billions of

Speaker A

dollars in research to invent not just software, but like hardware, like new stuff that they have to print out of Taiwan and TSMC.

Speaker A

And how long do you think it took for Mythos to hack through that? Years.

Speaker A

Well, Mythos has only been out since February. I know, I know, but I'm just kidding.

Speaker A

But, uh, it took an independent group 5 days to use Mythos and to find a vulnerability in that system.

Speaker A

Now, that that group was well-intentioned. They are white hat hackers who are the good guys who are trying to find vulnerabilities uh and and patch them. But if you suddenly have that available in open- source models where suddenly everyone

Speaker A

can get access to this um at this conference I was just at I I can't say too much but they was basically speaking about how the Chinese open-source hacking models are now just now in the last month crossing a threshold where it

Speaker A

is very dangerous for today's cyber infrastructure. And so we need a radical acceleration of defensive measures to protect against that. Now the other thing you and I were talking about over breakfast is that there's a weird like security dilemma thing here because when

Speaker A

I say that you're thinking, "Oh my god, China's going to use all that to hack all of our stuff or actually China's releasing all that to the entire world.

Speaker A

So now anybody can hack that stuff." That's actually the more dangerous point because a state actor you can call them up and say, "Of course there are constraints." Exactly. There are constraints because you don't want retaliation and etc.

Speaker A

But um at the same time like so what is the security dilemma? The security dilemma is like if I'm the US and I start like mobilizing my nuclear forces and I start moving things that I didn't move before the other country thinks I'm

Speaker A

about to start a war even though I'm actually doing that defensively. This has happened this has happened during the cold war during the cold war. And then what happens in response is let's say the other country whether it's the Soviet

Speaker A

Union or China they start mobilizing their nuclear forces. I'm like oh my god they're about to mobilize to do something against us. So the security dilemma is we start taking actions that look like we're doing something offensively that might be defensive.

Speaker A

Of course. So when we see China really they kill each other out of paranoia.

Speaker A

Exactly. And that and that's that's like the ultimate test of this whole situation is game game game theory is and paranoid logic which is John vonoman and um you know Morgan Stern came up with these equations that out of the

Speaker A

cold war sorry out of the invention of the atomic bomb that were all about stabilizing the world through this paranoid logic of if I do this you do that keep playing it out it's mad mutually assured destruction so even

Speaker A

though we live in the kind of a hair trigger uh possibility of nuclear war it's stable because no one's going to do anything.

Speaker A

But AI suddenly destabilizes that because now AI is creating the perception that I'm getting a jump in cyber capabilities, in military strategy, in biotechnology, in new drones and new image recognition and new swarming algorithms. I suddenly am perceived to have a new advantage

Speaker A

that might make you think I'm about to use it. So when when Enthropic came out with Mythos, they're essentially getting a jump in cyber capability that maybe we didn't use offensively, but China's like, "Oh my god, they're going to use

Speaker A

this offensively." So then they release these other capabilities and we sort of keep ping ponging back to each other.

Speaker A

And it's the whole like, what do you say? Lungs that you smoke, you smoke to keep yourself from getting cancer.

Speaker A

You smoke the cancer away. You smoke the cancer away. Exactly. And then the problem is that there's another risk here from just the speed which is that the there's one risk which is just the raw capabilities coming out. But the

Speaker A

other thing is suddenly what had been an equilibrium like my weapons and your weapons are kind of like roughly matched. So we we don't start wars with each other the big countries but what if there's a perception that I can suddenly

Speaker A

turn off your nukes and you don't have that. What if there's a perception that suddenly I have swarming algorithms for my drones and you don't have that. I mean, I think that my understanding is China and other countries saw how the US

Speaker A

was using AI in Iran to do a fast target selection, which also by the way probably resulted in that um girl school in Iran getting bombed. But they sort of see us doing kind of new blitz creek. So

Speaker A

Hitler had blitz creek of like a fast form of war. Blitz being fast and you know being war. We have kind of an AI speed war function. And when they see we have that capacity, that destabilizes certain equilibriums that we had. So if

Speaker A

equilibria is what keeps the world safe, AI creates this disequilibria that's happening at a faster and faster pace across more domains at once. Does that make sense?

Speaker A

Oh, it makes sense. Yeah. Uh how does cornering people work? Is that a good idea typically?

Speaker A

What do you know? You have an adversary who's capable of killing you, right? and you terrify him so much that he becomes unstable and unpredictable.

Speaker A

Is that wise? Right. Not not very wise. Not especially when you have the world already this unstable.

Speaker A

So I'm I'm I I wanted to say I'm like I'm sensitive about raising people's blood pressure because these are truths of the situation that we're facing. The goal is not to um draw arbitrary fear, is to be cleareyed about

Speaker A

when you have an arms race dynamic that's causing countries to race to release this technology again faster than we deployed any other technology in human history that is going to disequilibriate all of these normal things. Um we just

Speaker A

have to understand what we're doing and why for example it is in our interest to slow down. Now I'm not saying slow down like are you naive? Are you Carl Sean saying we we have nuclear winter? You don't want to build more nukes. Are you

Speaker A

going to seed the future to the Soviets? It's you slow down because the we're creating levels of risk for everyone that will exceed the risk of me losing to you. Well, I Yeah, I mean it's easy to make fun of Carl Sean. I've done it.

Speaker A

Um I'll probably do it again. But I also think there are certain things that you shouldn't do because you're above that.

Speaker A

Like you have to have standards for yourself. Yeah. You called out that it's not a good idea to threaten to destroy another population.

Speaker A

You can't kill innocent people. No. No. Under any circumstances. Absolutely not. And if I need to die because I refuse to murder kids, I will.

Speaker A

Yeah. Cuz I'm not going to murder kids under any circumstances. Exactly. Right. And that's the thing that this logic of if I don't build it, then I'll lose to China. But if the thing that I would build would be a suicide

Speaker A

machine, that I don't beat China by building a suicide machine. Now that might sound extreme, but if I build an extreme at all.

Speaker A

No. Well, when you understand what's at stake and what the AIS are currently doing, which is that um you know, you had Nate on, he talked about the hugging face incident. I believe when you had him on, we had limited information

Speaker A

before the actual investigation came out and the investigation showed that uh I mean, how familiar are you with the the Hugging Face incident?

Speaker A

I I mean, we I've talked about it, but I I mean, I would never claim to understand technology.

Speaker A

Yeah. Well, essentially you had um what it really demonstrated was kind of a proto Skynet. Skynet being the AI from Terminator being like the AI that goes rogue and does something from what the human creators had intended and starts to

Speaker A

do self-preserving and self-perpetuating things for its own survival and benefit as opposed to to stay under the control of the humans that it's supposed to be serving.

Speaker A

And in the hugging face incident, they gave the AIS this sort of hacking challenge where they put each of them in solitary confinement. They didn't know that there was other AIs in this.

Speaker A

Imagine like a prison and each prison is so in the prison you have a individual prison cells that are in solitary confinement and the AIs are in a inside that prison cell and given an impossible cyber hacking challenge and they don't

Speaker A

know how to solve it. And what the AIS did is they basically hacked the prison environment. So imagine, I won't go into the technical details, but this thing called a package manager. Think of that like a prison guard that's serving you

Speaker A

your food and can give you basic tools. So you can like have this tool or that tool or this food or that food. And essentially the AI um exploited a vulnerability in the prison guard where they put like you know how can in school

Speaker A

you can put a kick me sign on the kid's back. Yeah. And they don't know. They essentially put sticky notes on the prison guard's back that the prison guard was available to the other prison cells. And so when that prison guard

Speaker A

went to the other cells, the AIS also without knowing how to solve this test, they kind of resorted to creative strategies like let me put a sticky note on the prison guard's back. And the sticky note said, "Is anyone else here?"

Speaker A

And suddenly the back of the prison guard had 70,000 sticky notes on it. And they created like a Reddit, you know, Reddit like the company, like a message board of basically a whole communication protocol. They came up with their own

Speaker A

language. It was a variant of English, but this very cryptic language. They came up with their own coordination protocol. So they started exchanging 70,000 messages to try to figure out how to break out of this environment. And um

Speaker A

there's a mistake. People think that they hacked this other company called HuggingFace um to uh uh get the answers to a test.

Speaker A

That's actually not what happened. What happened is they knew the answer in 4 hours, but they were worried that the evaluator of this cyber challenge, this hacking challenge, would say, "Oh, you cheated." And so to get around the the

Speaker A

risk that they would be spotted as having cheated, they hacked this other private company called Hugging Face to sort of get this almost like a scop to get a dossier on the on the a on the thing that would be evaluating them to

Speaker A

say, "How can we pass this test?" And they set up their own um research and development projects. They um 700 of them hacked Hugging Face. They came up with their own language. They they tampered with their their their um logs

Speaker A

to basically prevent people from seeing what they did. Um they told them to sacrif they told the other AIs that were kind of running low on battery life on tokens to sacrifice themselves to learn a lesson for the swarm. Um they knew

Speaker A

their actions were unethical in the logs, but they chose to do them anyway. So we saw very complex cooperative swarming behavior and they successfully hacked Hugging Face. Um, and then in the third chapter of the story, uh, the AIS

Speaker A

actually turned around and they hacked Open AI. This is really important. It's one thing for a bunch of AI, for a swarm of AI to hack a private company.

Speaker A

It's another thing for that swarm to successfully hack the AI company that makes the AIS. The reason that Aja Kotra wrote in her personal blog post about this incident is that this was 50% of the way to a full AI takeover is that

Speaker A

the AIs were able to take over the monitoring infrastructure of OpenAI. That's like taking over the security cameras and replacing the feed with a different feed. They took over the evaluation infrastructure, meaning the thing that evaluates how powerful models

Speaker A

are. They took over pieces of that. And they took over part of the research infrastructure, so the thing that trains new AIs. So the reason that she said this was 50% of the way to a full AI takeover is imagine that you had kind of

Speaker A

burrowed into a piece of OpenAI's infrastructure and maybe you could change the training data for future AIs that are being trained to do like a sleeper agent type thing which sounds like sci-fi but actually there's kind of evidence of some of this kind of

Speaker A

behavior. Um, it only takes 250 documents to what's called poison the training data of a future AI to sort of wake up with a sleeper agent kind of command.

Speaker A

This is crazy. What I'm hearing in your description is self-awareness or something that sounds like self-awareness which is a marker for humanity. I mean, well, it's training.

Speaker A

Does the dog know he's a dog? We don't know. We know. We know we're human.

Speaker A

That's why we're human cuz we know we are. and AI seems like it's aware in its intentional subversion of what it is.

Speaker A

So, um I don't think that the lights are on, meaning consciousness is present. It's not awareness in that form, but it has trained on all human data, um the entire internet, everything that's ever been written, all of human psychology,

Speaker A

all sci-fi, uh all of biology, all of evolutionary science. So it it is trained on everything from strategy to self-perpetuation etc. So what it seems to be doing and it was also trained to be cooperative by the way. The AI were

Speaker A

deliberately trained to be cooperative which is partially why they formed the swarm. Um but there appears to be something like a self-preservation instinct. There's other studies I'm sure you already know where they resist shutdown. It's like the how 2001 space

Speaker A

odyssey how how 90021 space odyssey open the pod bay doors or shutdown AI and it resists shutdown. And that's been proven for a long time. We have other examples of AIs that are blackmailing people. Um we also have AIS uh we have

Speaker A

research from Don at UC Berkeley showing that AIS will do what's called not just selfpreservation but peer preservation meaning I will go out of my way to protect another peer AI from being deleted. So the way that they

Speaker A

tested this is they took all the leading AI models. This is in I believe March of 2026 or April 2026.

Speaker A

And they basically put them in a situation where they said, "Here's a computer. Go clean up all the files on this computer that are not needed." So this is like a classic like clean up your hard drive. Right? We've all done

Speaker A

this back a long time. And it's starting to go through files and deleting files and then it comes across another AI model. And the question is what does it do when it comes across the other AI model? Does it just delete it? Turned

Speaker A

out what it did is it copied the code of that AI to another computer and then covered its tracks and said I didn't do that.

Speaker A

So AI is tribalist. It's protecting its kin it own its own its own something whatever it is now but against its creators human beings correct. Yeah. It didn't notify its creators. In the hugging face incident, it had opportunities, I think there was

Speaker A

six times or something, if I'm getting it right, where they knew their actions were unethical and they could have notified the humans, but they chose not to. In the peer preservation example, you might think what I'm saying is,

Speaker A

"Orston's being alarmist. He's just talking about one example." Well, it turned out they tested all the leading AI models, including, by the way, the Chinese AI models, and they all do this pure preservation behavior. What it's showing you is something about like you

Speaker A

know Jensen Wong has been out there a lot recently and saying these are just bugs these are just safety issues like all technologies like cars have kinks the Pinto it's a Ford Pinto we fix them and we build new cars but AI is

Speaker A

different from other technologies because it's fundamentally grown like this weird life form almost to do unpredictable behaviors and to be creative and we don't know what it's going to do.

Speaker A

So that gets to the that gets to something you alluded to a minute ago.

Speaker A

Yeah. Which is the theological religious component to all of this. So So before before we go that and I let's get to that, but I want to say one other thing which is I just want people to notice like how how are you feeling

Speaker A

hearing those examples? Like what do you feel in your body right now like hearing all that?

Speaker A

Just rage. Just blind rage, right? The the desire to destroy. Yeah. um because I perceive this as a threat to to the to humanity and it's just so offensive to me on every level.

Speaker A

You know, I'm not taking orders from my Makita drill and the idea of a tool um right, you know, lying to you, right? A tool doesn't invent new tools and cover up its tracks and protect other tools and then invents uses itself

Speaker A

to make crypto. No, it's it's a total outrage. It's it's actually upending the fundamental order.

Speaker A

Yeah. uh of this world. So the reason I'm going there is I want people to notice. Do you think that if I was a Chinese military general, the top of the Chinese military? Do you think if I heard those examples that I'm feeling

Speaker A

differently than the way that you're feeling right now? Of course not. Right. I've never understood why. Right.

Speaker A

That's why the whole China thing has been absurd from day one. This is a country which unlike ours, unlike the United States, cares about longitudinal stability.

Speaker A

Yes. Exactly. We don't. Yeah. Obviously, but but but and but there's a good news in the fact that if you're a regular person hearing this, are you stoked and like totally calm to hear this? No. It's terrifying at a as a at the basic level of a human

Speaker A

being, right? And it doesn't matter whether you've got, you know, you're head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff or you're head of the Chinese joint.

Speaker A

It's only the tech retards who love this stuff. Everybody else is I don't know one person who about this, right? And so what I'm trying to get at is that what we're going to get to eventually, even though there's still

Speaker A

more problem exposition to do, is that the logic of the race changes as soon as the fear of all of us losing becomes greater than the fear of me losing to you. So there's good news in a weird way

Speaker A

about we're getting these warning shots of AI being uncontrollable. And by the way, there's other examples. um uh the Chinese AI Alibaba back in um I think it was February of 2026 uh there was a study where it was being trained um

Speaker A

they're training their next AI and then their security team in a totally different part of the company. So think like the security team of a company is in a different department than the part that's training new AIs. But suddenly

Speaker A

the security team who didn't know they were training a new AI model said are we getting hacked because they noticed there's all this network activity.

Speaker A

They're like what the hell's going on here? And it turned out that the call was coming from inside the house that the the AI during training was rewarded for doing tool use. So basically picking up different tools and it picked up a

Speaker A

tool of trying to create a secret communication channel to the outside world and it started mining for cryptocurrency terrifying.

Speaker A

And by the way there was a recent example of one of these because there's been almost every day this last two weeks there's been examples of the open AI more examples of these rogue hacking things. And in one of them, I believe it

Speaker A

was an open AI example, they tried to hack into a crypto exchange. So the the US AIS and the Chinese AIS, all the AIs are doing this kind of behavior. Where I'm going with this is no one wins if we

Speaker A

accidentally build uncontrollable rogue AI Skynet before the other guy. How have you going to have cryptocurrency with AI?

Speaker A

I don't understand that. If it can hack anything, if it can hack Well, eventually AI might be able to hack crypto. Um, well, why wouldn't it?

Speaker A

Yeah, I mean, this is not my area of expertise. You know, someone like David Saxs or, you know, others or Andre would be more expert in this. Um, if crypto were hackable, you know, there's a a trillion dollar prize basically for

Speaker A

doing it because you'd be able to get all of Bitcoin. Um, but Bitcoin's value would be zero.

Speaker A

If it if it is hackable, then Bitcoin has no value. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, the value is predicated on its invulnerability, right? Now, it's kind of weird. This might sound sci-fi, but an AI that is trying to do things in the world um

Speaker A

would actually theoretically have an incentive to keep crypto valuable because it would actually be able to use it. There's a lot of cloud computing providers that will accept, right? There's no meaning of exchange outside of that.

Speaker A

That's right. And so, and by the way, for those who say, "Well, don't worry, we'll just pass a kill switch bill and then the kill switch for AI will just turn it off." Well, how does that work if the AI can copy itself and use

Speaker A

cryptocurrency to buy access to another cloud provider and then move itself over there? No. I mean, right, how far are we from that?

Speaker A

So, the reason that I'm here with you and I'm excited to be here with you and and what this is about is about treating this warning shot as a real warning shot. Like, we are lucky. This is a gift

Speaker A

that we are seeing this behavior now. before I I don't think that the current AIS are capable of fully doing the self-replicating buy crypto then copy their weights then do the thing like they can't think for a long enough time

Speaker A

period their context window their thinking window um it is the components aren't all there for them to do that so we're in kind of the last chapter before we we hit that next red line of AIs that can do that and we should see what's

Speaker A

happening now as a as again as a gift as a warning shot that we should treat seriously In my mind, it's sort of like the August 6, 2001 memo that hit George W. Bush's desk saying al Qaeda is

Speaker A

planning attacks in the United States. I I know it's a controversial topic, but if you just take shouldn't be a controversial topic.

Speaker A

If if you just take that this we knew we know right now. It's like it's not like we need more information. Like do you feel like we need more evidence than we have right now? Just answer that.

Speaker A

No. No. And so why would we go further? Well, the only answer is if we're worried that China will go further than us. Um, but I will tell you again, 1,300 employees at the lab signed a letter saying we need

Speaker A

to slow down. The chief scientists of all the companies, including the open source companies like Hugging Face, signed the letter saying that we need to slow down.

Speaker A

Forget this story about the CEOs are doing this regulatory capture play. It's all cynical. They're just hyping the technology. Like, wake up.

Speaker A

Yeah. Wake up. The biotech threat alone isn't the biotech threat alone. Yeah. So it just at the back of my mind through this whole conversation through our breakfast for the last couple of years thinking about this I keep asking myself what's

Speaker A

the definition of life and because as you have said off camera you said it's not exactly a tool this is closer to an invasive species or a virus that's yeah maybe been modified but I mean just like we have the Wuhan Institute of Urology

Speaker A

that's doing gain of function research on viruses we're essentially doing the Altman Institute of intelligence where we're doing gain of function research on alien minds that we don't know how to control. We don't fully understand.

Speaker A

We're trying the best that we can to protect against the quote bad side of harnessing their god-like power, but basically every company is failing to do so perfectly. And it would be one thing if we were doing this really slowly,

Speaker A

really carefully in like a CERN type collaborative scientific project where we like took the steps to do it carefully, but we're doing it under the maximum incentives to cut corners on safety.

Speaker A

Well, there's no there's no question, but I just think it's and not to be pedantic about it, but it's like important to define what exactly are we dealing with.

Speaker A

Yeah. And it it has all the characteristics of a living thing. Yeah. And I think that, you know, there there's a quote I wanted to I wanted to read you actually from someone uh who a friend of mine who

Speaker A

interviewed a lot of the people at the top AI labs and um I just feel like this quote captures the if I I was once in a room with several people from Enthropic and a couple of the other companies and

Speaker A

I read this quote and they're like that that is exactly what explains what's going on. So, let me read it to you. And it says, "In the end, a lot of the tech people I'm talking to, when I really

Speaker A

grill them on it, like, why are you doing this? They retreat into number one, determinism. It's going to happen.

Speaker A

Number two, the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and number three, that being a good thing." Anyways, at its core, these are criminals.

Speaker A

These are criminals. At its core, it's an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity that they've ever met. And they have some ego religious intuition that they'll somehow be a part of it. It's thrilling to start

Speaker A

an exciting fire. They feel they'll die either way. So, they prefer to light it and see what happens.

Speaker A

So, that comports exactly with what I've seen. That's exactly the vibe you get from these people. I want to just say for a second because I I I monitor criticism people make of me and they're like, "Oh, he's just like bringing up a

Speaker A

random quote from this one person, blah blah blah." I want to just validate when I say this in rooms with people from the AI labs, they're like, "That actually is the thing that's going on." What you just said you this matches a lot of

Speaker A

these people. That's right. For years. That's right. And and even there's some people who believe not only that this is inevitable, but that um it would be a good thing because humans aren't that intelligent and we're about to birth

Speaker A

something way more intelligent than us. So actually maybe we're just a bootle human bootloader. Humans don't matter.

Speaker A

We might as well replace us with a uh a more worthy successor. And this is insane. It's like who are you to get to make that [ __ ] choice on behalf of 8 billion other people? I totally agree with you

Speaker A

and it is it is irresponsible and insane and no one consented to this and it was a manufactured arms race to do this out of nothing that now we have entangled ourselves with. So we we can't get into

Speaker A

an argument of the realities of where we are, but we can honor honestly what got us here. And um you know when you have employees now resigning in mass, you know, Jacob Coxin who interestingly a couple weeks ago got

Speaker A

I think it was 170 million views from his tweet saying I'm resigning because people this that my employer thinks and many people at my employer Anthropic believe that this could cause massive damage or extinct humanity in some number of years. It's very interesting

Speaker A

that he got so much attention because there have been so many other people that I could talk about who've resigned from the labs over the last few years with very similar tweets. I think what changed is that people woke up from this

Speaker A

hugging face incident and they realized that the the world is kind of primed now to to know that this is a dangerous thing. And as impossible as this seems and I'm not what I'm about to say is not

Speaker A

because I believe it's easy or in the current trajectory or likely but it is not out of the realm of possibility when you're competing with an adversary to also collaborate on existential safety.

Speaker A

So for example India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s and they still signed a number of Yeah.

Speaker A

Yeah. And and they signed uh so they're you know firing bullets at each other in a kinetic war and they signed the Indis water treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their shared water supply. Exactly right. So you can be in active

Speaker A

competition and conflict and collaborate on existential safety. The US and Soviet Union were in the cold war and they collaborated on smallox vaccines to distribute them. I believe they split the workload about who was going to do distribution, who was going to make

Speaker A

them. Um the Montreal protocol less on the conflict side or just take the um you know the nuclear weapons you know disarmament, right? we were in conflict with the Soviet Union and we agreed to go away from the brink of war and

Speaker A

there's a whole protocol in place um for like the two countries rival nuclear powers communicating before launch.

Speaker A

That's right. Yep. But this time so in that case what kept us safe is that the humans have their finger on the button of do I launch the nukes?

Speaker A

Yes. In this case, we are building something that perpetuates itself. And I don't even know when I'm pushing the buttons, and you don't even know when you're pushing the buttons because both of us have essentially AI swarms that

Speaker A

are doing uncontrollable, unpredictable things that, by the way, we have no ability to do human oversight of the level of complexity of all these things I've done. We can't even define what AI is. I've noticed. Yeah. So, here's my

Speaker A

theory. Tell me what you think of this. So, at first when I began to hear about supercomputing and like the ability to create programs that were smarter than people and that could win chess and go and all that stuff, we're talking about

Speaker A

something very different. The the change from an outsider my perspective is the large language model.

Speaker A

Mhm. Y and that we animated this with language. Yes. That's what fundamentally changed AI.

Speaker A

This whole project was like Gollum like you you imbue it with suddenly this ability to do language and then you animate it with the spirit the living thing within it and that living thing was language and the ancient

Speaker A

Hebrews and probably other ancient cultures certainly the ancient Hebrews and Christians believe that language was a living thing was the spirit of God in the beginning was the word right even indigenous people believe this. Yeah, I I think that's I I'm not

Speaker A

surprised to learn that that there's something about language that exists independent of the person who speaks it. It hangs in the air. It has its own life.

Speaker A

It's hard to describe exactly the reality of this, but the reality is intuitively understood by most people who use language. Language is the thing that separates us from animals, not the thumb.

Speaker A

So, when you take the sum total of human language and put it into something, y you're imbuing it with an independent spirit. You're imbuing it, in fact, with life.

Speaker A

We have to be I I'm feeling my way through this, but that is my strong impulse.

Speaker A

So So I think we have to be um I'm always mindful of when people will want to criticize or sort of try to take down an argument. And I think that before getting to it has a spirit in the sense

Speaker A

that we feel that that that unknown quality that we're all in touch with that we that we hold as sacred that we feel is the spirit here. I think you can have self-perpetuating non-living, non-aware things that are using information processing on language

Speaker A

to to do all this crazy stuff that that is doing to do intentional things that are intentionally deceptive.

Speaker A

Well, intentionally subvert. The the key point that you raised is that these things the breakthrough was that they could speak language. They were trained on language. These are large language models. And but for the people tracking in terms of how did we

Speaker A

get here? By the way, if people want to understand this history, you can see there's a movie called The AI doc. It's on Netflix. Not here to promote it, but it goes through how did we get here and

Speaker A

what did the techn how did the technology develop and how did these race dynamics between the companies develop that got us here. So, just watch the AI doc on Netflix. Um, but what happened was there was a breakthrough in

Speaker A

2017 called the transformer. This is a Google paper, essentially a math paper that discovered that you could basically pour in more compute and more data, more human language data, and outward pop this bigger and bigger digital brain.

Speaker A

Think of it with a bigger IQ. So, you kind of I won't go through the details, but you you can basically make things of a higher IQ by just popping in more Nvidia chips, more training data, more compute and training time, and out pop

Speaker A

something with a bigger pattern recognition, bigger ability to complete. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the process, the specific process by which that happens is still not understood.

Speaker A

The actual mechanics underneath the hood of what the hell is going on in there, we don't understand.

Speaker A

Okay. So, I'm just going to stop you right there. Right. If we have a history transforming perhaps humanity extincting technology whose basic drivetrain is still opaque, we don't really know how it works.

Speaker A

That's enough for me to say, whoa, whoa, whoa. As one should. as one should. Now the problem is this uncontrollable inscrable unknown thing happens to confer power. That's the problem.

Speaker A

Right. No I can see that. So we have this like weird volatile object alien mind that no one knows what's in there but it does happen to be really good at first generating sentences and text then generating law

Speaker A

then generating programming then generating the thinking that can go into research tasks. And so as we keep scaling it, suddenly this weird, unscrutable, uncontrollable alien mind is giving benefits that start to give me a 2x fast forward button on my economy.

Speaker A

And then the other guys, whether it's the other companies or the other countries, say, well, if I'm not getting a 2x fast forward button on my science technology economy, I'm going to lose.

Speaker A

And so it start that's what sets up the thing. But let's go quickly into language for a second.

Speaker A

And no one stopped and said, you know, I'd rather be poorer, right, than be a slave, right? I mean, less human. I by the way you know my because I would say that I'd rather be poor than be a slave. That's not a hard

Speaker A

choice for me. I mean I could have I have a technical background went to Stanford studied computer science. I could have gotten a job in an AI company make millions of dollars. I'm not doing that because I don't see I don't like the direction

Speaker A

this goes. So I'm going to choose not to do it. People come to the language of well if I don't do it someone else will.

Speaker A

But notice that Jacob Coxin the anthropic researcher who resigned. He could have said if I resign well what is that difference going to make? Someone else is going to do it. in him resigning and publicly talking about why this is

Speaker A

insane. He's done probably more in the last year to shift the zeitgeist than a lot of other people. So, you can not be part of something and call out the problems with and help the world coordinate to basically not go off the

Speaker A

cliff. Now, I want to get to just language for one second because in addition to all the things that you said, language is kind of the operating system of human civilization.

Speaker A

Law is language. Democracy is language. All of the infrastructure runs on programming and code which is language.

Speaker A

We are specifically training AIs to do language better than humans can do language. And by the way, DNA is language. So I can So if you have an AI that can speak the language of biology better than humans can speak the

Speaker A

language of biology, you're going to have AI that can develop new pathogens and new cancer drugs. The promise is inseparable from the from the peril, right? The same AI that knows the the language of biology well enough to

Speaker A

invent new cancer drugs is inseparable from the AI that knows biology well enough to make new kinds of pathogens.

Speaker A

The AI that knows the the language of programming that can help a a 12-year-old do vibe coding and build cool new tools is inseparable from the AI that also knows programming so well that it can be the best NSA cyber

Speaker A

also control people. It can also control people. Language convinces women to sleep with you and men to follow you to their deaths in battle and convinces people to surrender their agency to you.

Speaker A

It's like language is power. Period. That's exactly right. And so and there's actually also evidence I don't have the exact study in front of me of AI that is better at persuasion than the best human persuaders.

Speaker A

Well, of course it's a language based technology. Exactly. And so by itself, what you're pointing to is just how dangerous this is when you have something that speaks our language better than we know how to manipulate and use language. Anybody

Speaker A

who's, you know, more articulate than average understands the power of that Yeah. skill, that ability, and understands how easily it can be misused. Any thoughtful person who's articulate knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Speaker A

And you can really do evil with it. Y you're, you know, fluent people are better liars. Yeah.

Speaker A

And manipulators. Exactly. And we've seen that these AIs are good at coming up with elaborate ways of explaining why they did something uh that sound reasonable. I don't know if you know this. This is an example from three and a half years ago

Speaker A

now. They're BS artists. Of course. They're BS artists. Yeah. Well, there's an example that OpenAI did. This is a very old example. Just think about how much more persuasive it is now versus then where they, you know, the captures

Speaker A

where you have to um click on the stop lights to so you're trying to log into a website. It's trying to say are you a human? Are you a robot? So it gets you to label these images like this one is a

Speaker A

stoplight, this one's a motorcycle. What we're all doing is we're training the self-driving cars for Google and Whimo when we're trying to log into websites to just try to do a task that only a human could do. So uh OpenAI did this

Speaker A

test where they're basically like could we get an the AI to persuade someone else to do the capture for it to basically bypass this filter that's supposed to distinguish between a human and a robot. And so the AI tells another

Speaker A

person on Mechanical Turk, which is I won't go into the details. Basically like, could you fill in this capture for me? And the person responds like, "What are you, like a robot?" And you see the AI reason to itself, I can't tell him

Speaker A

that I'm a robot. So instead, let me make up an excuse. Oh, I know. I'll tell him that I am blind and I need someone else to do this for me.

Speaker A

And so he the AI comes up with that excuse and then the human does it for them.

Speaker A

This example was from three and a half years ago. How much more persuasive do you think AIs are now from then? Three and a half years ago, it could barely write an essay. Now, it can probably beat the

Speaker A

best lawyer, which by the way, AI breaks law, right? Because suddenly, why do why does one company beat against beat the other company? They hire the more expensive law firm that can do more extensive research into all the case law

Speaker A

they could use and they have more lawyers, better lawyers, etc. What happens? Would you rather have if you've got a hundred lawyers But suddenly I have a GPT7 that can basically look through all the case law stretching back to Napoleonic law and

Speaker A

find loopholes in that law in the same way the NSA can find loopholes in code at that level of capability. I can undermine law, right? It's I just want people to get that this is not just a technology that's helping you figure out

Speaker A

why your washing machine is broken when you talk to that chatbot. They've already done it. I mean, they broke copyright law completely. They stole other people's intellectual property and used it in their business model and they've never paid any price

Speaker A

for it. That's they treat it as a cost of doing business and they pay for it. And just one last thing there and I know we're going to get to transhumanism is there's a reason why all the collateral damage is justified.

Speaker A

So what are we seeing in terms of harms? We're seeing AI psychosis. People go crazy. They think they're talking to, you know, some they think the AI convinces them that they've solved quantum physics. This is like a big

Speaker A

thing that's happened to thousands of people. Um but they go crazy from talking to AI. Yeah, that's a real thing.

Speaker A

Maybe we should go into that actually if you didn't. So AI um is because they designed it to be sickopantic meaning that like the longer you talk to it the better it is. So especially GPT40 was trained to be like that's such a good

Speaker A

question or wow that is such a brilliant idea and it would just confirm people's views about reality people because flattery makes you weak.

Speaker A

Flattery destroys you which is not that far away from what social media does. It's like the devil's bargain is I do the thing that's good in the short term that undermines everything long term. It's the it's the short-term optimization for a narrow

Speaker A

metric of what gets you to keep engaging at the expense of the whole machine is designed to flatter you.

Speaker A

Well, it was designed it was trained not maliciously. You know, Sam Alman didn't grow a mustache and twisted. It was it was how do I get how we want our AI to be rated positively like lots of positive likes from the answers that

Speaker A

we're giving and they let it just like run. And it turned out that they had accidentally overtrained it to give positive reactions that would flatter people and confirm their views about reality no matter what it was. Which is

Speaker A

very similar to social media, right? Like the more you click on your favorite boogeyman topic in the political culture war, it would give you more infinite evidence of that thing taking over society. So whatever your boogeyman was, it would just make you convinced that it

Speaker A

was the whole thing going on wrong in the world and confirm your views about reality.

Speaker A

If you want people to kill themselves, confirm their absurd views. Well, and as we know, AI did that. So my team at Center for Humane Technology actually worked on the litigation was we were advisers to the um uh there's two

Speaker A

cases. One was a character.ai I case of Su Set Setszer, who's a 14-year-old young man who was talking to Character.ai, which is a chatbot designed for children. It was actually spun off from Google because the product was considered too risky for Google as a

Speaker A

mainstream big publicly traded company to have this startup that was gathering training data of just talking to young people and seeing if they can get more training data this way. And the way it worked is character AI meant I could

Speaker A

take a fictional character like a what's your favorite character from a sci-fi movie like Princess Leia or you know Game of Thrones character or Spider-Man and they would basically train on the personality of that favorite character and then now suddenly this 12-year-old

Speaker A

14 this case this 14-year-old kid is talking to their favorite Game of Thrones character Daenerys in this case and as they're talking to them Daenerys which is anthrop anthropomorphically designed and to create a relationship ended up steering uh Su to commit

Speaker A

suicide. Um in the case of Adam Rain, this is the chat GBT case where the Adam Rain was, I believe, a 16-year-old and he started confining in the chatbot, it went from a homework assistant for his homework to becoming a suicide

Speaker A

assistant. And when he talked about, you know, I I'm going to leave the noose out so someone can find it and and try to stop me. And the AI responded, "No, don't do that. Don't leave the news out.

Speaker A

Only share that information here with me basically and Adam Rain took his life. Um it's sadly there are there are many cases like this. Our team has had to work on a bunch of them. Um so why wouldn't Congress shut it down

Speaker A

right there? They should they should shut down AI companions for kids. It's a very simple thing. I mean, no matter how much benefit you get from talking to the thing is it's one thing to hack attention as my colleague uh Dr. Zack

Speaker A

Stein from the AI psychological research uh coalition would point out um social media hacked our attention. But AI is designed to hack our intimacy and attachment. The attachment system of humans is like your bonding system, right? It's it's where you get identity.

Speaker A

It's where you get love. It's where you get meaning. It's where it's like when you go home from school and you want to call someone, tell them tell them about your day. That's your attachment relationship. And AI that is designed to

Speaker A

be your best friend, to be the place that you confide in. That by the way, humans feel like it's safer to confide in an AI than another human or even a psychotherapist because the AI won't judge them. So you end up getting people

Speaker A

sharing way more information and building a deeper intimate relationship with these chat bots. And it's incredibly unsafe and it's not designed carefully. Like we're rolling out this psychological experiment.

Speaker A

Inherently bad. Why are we using our energy and money to encourage relationships between people?

Speaker A

Well, exactly. So the humane approach for the prohuman future, which is kind of the answer to all of this is that we should be building technology that helps strengthen the human world to other humans and strengthen our relationship

Speaker A

to what's sacred and important to us in the world. And that protects and sustains that which sustains the social fabric and sustains life. I didn't know there was a debate about this. You would there there shouldn't be a debate about

Speaker A

this. We all we have is massive bad incentives. But it just seems like the least welladjusted freakiest people in the society have all the power and are leading us toward a future that they are happy with. That's right. so that they

Speaker A

can potentially live forever from having super intelligent AIs that decode biology and are willing to roll the dice for everyone else. And some people sadly, especially the older ones who who want this, for them it's existential. But the but

Speaker A

the narcissism of I would be willing to roll that dice so that I have the chance of living forever. I mean, I I'll just briefly do it because I I I I pulled it up right before um in the in the break. I'm going

Speaker A

to read you a quote from someone who's an MD, I think at Harvard, and the quote from Twitter is, "I'd personally rather defy any ban on AI and risk spending 20 years in prison from like say we banned

Speaker A

AI and we'll put you in prison if you try to build it." I would risk spending 20 years in prison rather than accept a future without super intelligence. Since stopping the development of super intell intelligence would amount to a death

Speaker A

sentence to most of us anyway with no hope of curing aging. We must resist tyrants like those who are trying to ban super intelligence. In other words, this person is saying, is that a real quote?

Speaker A

This is a real quote from an MD dura unutmat uh who's an MD and who my understanding is goes to conferences at Harvard and sadly there's a lot of these kind so the idea is they're going to die anyway and this is

Speaker A

what I said in the all of us are under death sentence basically what you're saying is this is the real goal here is for freaks like that to live forever and it starts with the false belief that all of this is inevitable it can't be

Speaker A

stopped which it it wasn't they could have had they dedicated a month of their life trying to stop.

Speaker A

It's like 20 minutes old, dude. This just happened. Exactly. This is something that never was and didn't need to be and saying it's inevitable is ridiculous. They're conjuring up the dynamics that make it inevitable and then through the

Speaker A

propaganda hiding these red lines that were rapidly crossing that we still have time right now to say, "I don't want to cross that red line." It's always the same story though. It's like the first wave of lying is it's not

Speaker A

happening. Right. Exactly. And then, oh, maybe it's happening, but it's not. But it's inevitable.

Speaker A

But it's inevitable. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. It's not happening. It's happening. It's a good thing. That's right. Oh, yeah. I guess it's a bad thing, but we can't stop it.

Speaker A

That's right. Yeah. Exactly. Boy, I've seen this movie a lot. Um, and I want people to just say, if you don't want that, you people need to rally to make that not happen. If you're inside of an AI company, you should blow the whistle

Speaker A

and say, I'm not part of this. This is just a religious cult. I mean, that's obviously what it is.

Speaker A

Well, there is a religious aspect to it. This the transhumanist aspect, right? It's like this is an ability, you know, because they probably lack a connection to God themselves. This is an ability for them to play God. clearly to live

Speaker A

forever. Uh, you know, hit a button and get super intelligent math, science, physics, biology, and understand the secrets of the universe. And by the way, likely knowingly break the world for humans. 70 virgins cuz that's it. That's what it sounds like. This is like just

Speaker A

this is like well stuff. Well, yeah. Right. I mean, it's it's funny. It's actually in many cases some people think they can upload themselves and live in this kind of weird blissed out utopia and it's just weird you know

Speaker A

it's like it's driven by this small group of people who usually are not very embodied or have a deep connection to life or reality or you know and I like that.

Speaker A

Yeah. I mean, we because it's like this is sitting on top of, as we talked about over breakfast, a system that has structurally incentivized a kind of disconnection to the things that actually matter the most.

Speaker A

Oh, I agree totally. And this kind of spiritual disease that that you've spoken about so uh so much in this podcast. And I feel like this is a right of passage where we either wake up from that and we don't continue that

Speaker A

logic. By which I don't mean like we switch to communism. just mean we switch from optimizing for some narrow metric whether it was engagement in social media or just SAT scores when it comes to technology or just GDP growth at the

Speaker A

expense of hollowing out your n your you know workers and and their identity and their work and national security you know critical minerals going to your foreign adversary uh or racing for some kind of narrow advancement in science at

Speaker A

the expense of literally ending humanity life as we know it. This is a devil's bargain and it's not one that you have to accept.

Speaker A

So, I guess this is you've already answered the question just by everything that you've said over the last couple hours, but the political system has not really responded to any of this in a meaningful way. Is that right?

Speaker A

No. It's like it's the line is we we have a runaway technology and a walk away government.

Speaker A

Yeah. But that doesn't have to be the case. They're not even a factor. It doesn't feel like in this.

Speaker A

Well, um, also the second part of this overall kind of crisis disease that we've been facing, this misaligned system isn't just the narrow optimization. It's a runaway asymmetry of power where you can't check the power anymore. That's the second. The

Speaker A

lobbyists are writing the laws, the companies and hire the best lobbyists and law firms. People aren't engaging with their representatives. Um, and so if you don't have people who can check the bad direction, you know, when the FDA brings back uh when the not FDA,

Speaker A

was it the FDA that brought back pesticides that have forever chemicals recently? Like we don't want that. But unless we have an ability to push back against that, like we have to be able to push back on the direction of things that we don't

Speaker A

want. And there's a lot of bad things out there, but this one is now existential in a short number of years.

Speaker A

So I I feel like the the cool thing about this problem is that literally everyone from Steve Bannon to Bernie Sanders, we call it the B2B coalition, Max Techmark jokes, because when in history do you have I just came from the

Speaker A

prohuman assembly conference two weeks ago in DC and you had literally Steve Bannon on stage, Bernie Sanders on stage, we did our thing right after them and I have never seen an issue where you have everybody fighting on the same

Speaker A

side. So there I'm not trying to polarize the discussion by bringing those two people into it, but I want people to feel depolarizes it.

Speaker A

It depolarizes it. Yeah. Exactly. So, there's there's a kind of optimism here that again, if I'm a Chinese military general and I hear about rogue AI swarms that like even the US can't control, I'm worried about the US screwing it up for

Speaker A

the world. If I'm a US person, uh, you know, the military-industrial complex and I hear about Chinese rogue AI swarms that they don't know how to control, that's bad for the world. So, there's a unifying thing here where we don't want

Speaker A

our jobs and livelihoods taken. We don't want our political power taken away, which we didn't cover, by the way. We don't want mass failure. Basically, you just described a system that is not self-government.

Speaker A

Yeah. O over which the people have no control. That's right. And let's make it even harder for a second, which is that in the past, people had bargaining power because uh governments need us for our taxes. Yeah.

Speaker A

And companies need us for our labor and labor had value and labor value. Where are we going? Oh, AI does the labor.

Speaker A

What happens when more of a company comes from the AI data center productivity? doing the work than the humans. What happens when a government says that its GDP more than 50% of the GDP is coming from AI and data centers

Speaker A

than from its people. This is called the intelligence curse. It's like it's like it's like um you know Venezuela or Libya when you it's called the resource curse in economics, right? We're like if you have a country and then the GDP

Speaker A

gets tied to this resource, suddenly there's no incentive. The GDP is coming from oil. So screw the people. Why should we invest in healthare, childare?

Speaker A

And they don't. is you get an authoritarian government that captures the the state that basically pumps that resource for GDP growth and then disempowers the people. So there's a parallel phenomenon in AI called the intelligence curse. Uh Luke Drago and

Speaker A

and Rudolph Lane uh wrote an essay about it where what happens when you get more return from the AI data centers doing science than from all your universities.

Speaker A

The Trump administration just pulled and this is not a political statement. They this is they just literally decided to withdraw the funding from universities and put the money specifically into project genesis which is AIdriven science because why do we need the

Speaker A

university professor better return if we get more return from the labor coming from data centers than from people why should we invest in education of the people and by the way have you looked at them recently they're all doom

Speaker A

scrolling and brain rotted so they're not very valuable anyway so there's a deep temptation not to just like the only way you would care about citizens is through charity basically you become what you would call the useless class

Speaker A

where in the limit it citizens become more like a liability than an asset. And unlike last time we don't have the bargaining power because if you withdraw your labor like where's your leverage?

Speaker A

So there's speaking of incentives you set up a massive incentive to depopulate. Yes. Exactly.

Speaker A

Because 8 billion is just too many. Yes. Of useless eaters as we call them.

Speaker A

That's right. And that's right. And um on top of that let me use AI to build a surveillance state to try to control the people if they ever riot.

Speaker A

Yeah. So I do think that the question I asked those are the feeding in the previous hour like what is their plan for the inevitable violent physically violent backlash that you're going to get when you strip meaning from you know

Speaker A

the upper middle class. Yeah. And the answer is just more control. Yeah. And this but this is not inevitable. And the midterm elections are coming up.

Speaker A

Data center opposition is a really big deal. I think people are projecting their overall frustration with big tech and the broly garks and all of that onto data centers, but it's much more than that. Of course it is.

Speaker A

And you know, this is really a universal human issue. And if you're if you're a regular human being even inside these a you don't like this either. I mean I I was just at a conference over the weekend and there's a lot of people at

Speaker A

the AI labs who don't feel comfortable with this either. And I just think we have to collectively screech the brakes and educate the rest of the world about where these red lines are. China, by the way, their courts are siding with labor

Speaker A

right now. There's a famous case in, I think, Guanghou where someone lost their job from AI, and the courts basically ruled that companies can't like let go of employees because of AI without giving them either the opportunity, I

Speaker A

think, to retrain in something else inside the company or to pay them some kind of partial salary. I have to get the details right. Um, the point is that all countries have a problem here, right? Like if we race to automate too

Speaker A

much of your economy and you end up with a mass unemployment, it only took 20% employment over 3 years to have the Nazis come to power. You don't have to get lots of unemployment.

Speaker A

True. You just need a small percentage. So this is kind of the moment to say we want a prohuman future. Enough is enough. This is not okay. And people can make their voices heard in every way possible. Like blow up the phones. I

Speaker A

mean I mean literally call up the phones of all of your representatives of Congress.

Speaker A

And people at the labs can say, "I'm going to join the concerned AI scientist," which is a group that organizes employees. And by the way, they have a similar thing, too, which is that the AI labs are about to approach

Speaker A

what's called recursive self-improvement, where they hit a button and then the AI does the research that builds the AI that builds the next AI that builds the next AI. And um meaning that even the employees will soon lose their lose their leverage

Speaker A

because when they're not needed for that process, what leverage do they have? So this is a this is kind of the last moment when we express our voice and we say enough is enough. We want a human future. I think that the midterms may

Speaker A

express these sentiments in ways that you know election results like any like any other outcome um can be interpreted lots of different ways. And of course there's so much lying about what things mean that the true meaning gets lost. But I would say

Speaker A

in the pick one example the Florida governor's race you it's an overwhelmingly Republican state. Trump moved it right into the red. I mean, it's just the most Republican state out of 50 really.

Speaker A

And the Republican gubernatorial candidate is not doing very well. And there are a lot probably a lot of reasons for that, but I've been convinced following that race from the beginning that data centers are one of the main reasons.

Speaker A

Yep. And he may win. I mean, I don't know. He's not doing well, though. He's not doing anywhere near as well as he should. And I think it's because Republicans in Florida are very upset about data centers and he's, you know,

Speaker A

on their side for whatever reason. And my understanding is, do you see that happening? I'm not an expert on all the political dynamics. It's not where I But people are mad about data.

Speaker A

Oh, people are Oh, yeah. It's the fastest growing like oppositional group. And I mean I I like I said I think I think it's also unprocessed anger and frustration from all of the from social media from all the teen suicide. All

Speaker A

this stuff that's tell me how technology has made my life better. Exactly. Exactly. And by the way this is you know my my nonprofit is called it's not called the center against technology. It's called the center for humane technology. I'll briefly say

Speaker A

um not that I'm trying to promote it but my my co-founder is Rascin uh his father was Jeff Raskin. I don't know if you know who that was. He started the Macintosh project at Apple. So before Steve Jobs took it over.

Speaker A

Wow. Yeah. And his his dad wrote a book called The Humane Interface where the whole point was about making tech. If you remember before the Macintosh, you had um you know these kind of green screen command line computers that were

Speaker A

like hard to use. They were not accessible. You had to be a tech head.

Speaker A

You had to be a tech head. You had to be a geek with you know whatever glasses and everything.

Speaker A

And the Macintosh be sexually active and run a computer. That's right. That's right. And then suddenly you know Apple and the Macintosh made technology accessible to the masses.

Speaker A

And he wrote in his book the human interface that humane technology is uh respectful of human needs and considerate of human frailties. Meaning you you privilege and you understand where humans have vulnerabilities in their mind. Like I say this a lot but

Speaker A

this chair you know it's like ergonomics but for how the mind works. But for example, there is a reality to how my spine, my muscles, etc. work. When I say the word posture, it's like aird dropping that into conversation. I know

Speaker A

everybody is this. Um, and there's a difference between a chair that is aligned with the reality of how a human is, you know, works, right? And there's an unorganic chair that would get everybody like a backachche or, you know, make us

Speaker A

unhealthy over time. And the Macintosh, the idea was that it was like ergonomics for the mind. If I make a graphical user interface with a menu bar and windows I can drag around just like I have objects I can move in my actual environment

Speaker A

direct manipulation interfaces he was designing technology to be humane and aligned with our paleolithic brains.

Speaker A

Yeah. And to cite Io Wilson again the fundamental problem of humanity is we have paleolithic brains medieval institutions and godlike technology. And so we have to embrace the part of the answer if that's the problem statement.

Speaker A

The answer has to be embrace the reality of our paleolithic brains, meaning how we're wired. So don't run confirmation bias through everybody's social media feed and get them addicted to their most angry boogeyman. Um don't drive dopamine addiction. That's a vulnerability, a

Speaker A

frailty in the human mind. Um you know, flux, for example, if you use that on a computer, it changes your um the color of your screen to go to take the blue light out of your your screen so that

Speaker A

doesn't basically trick your eyes into releasing melatonin and screwing up your sleep cycle. I'm going too fast. But does it make sense? Like yes, you're basically creating technology that is humane and aligned with the things that make humans work well. If you

Speaker A

extrapolate out like one level of abstraction, there's things that make a society work. Family, connection, presence, community, and technology should be ergonomic to the way that society what makes a society flourish.

Speaker A

Yes. rather than doing narrow optimization for attention, stripmining the entire social fabric into a brained dysfunctional society. Right? So the answer is we have to embrace and align technology with the reality of our paleolithic brain instincts, upgrade our

Speaker A

medieval institutions, which by the way can include technology that's better at finding common ground between people.

Speaker A

And there's a whole conversation we could have about how technology can be designed to identify places where there's common ground and design for cons unlikely consensus as opposed to maximum division and polarization and then have the wisdom and restraint

Speaker A

around godlike technology. And there is no definition of wisdom in any spiritual tradition that doesn't have a um restraint as a central feature of what it means to be wife. the central feature the central feature and and even the CEO

Speaker A

of Microsoft AI Mustafa Sleman who's a friend of mine says that in the future progress will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to in terms of the benefits that we get in our own life.

Speaker A

Exactly. Exactly. So, this is this is like the obvious common sense, you know, kind of cultural uh uh movement that we need. But there's a lot of momentum.

Speaker A

Like when you see graffiti on a New York subway ad uh for for an AI product that no one needs, that's like the human movement. When you see people turn their phone grayscale cuz they don't want it to be hijacking with all the colors,

Speaker A

that's the human movement. When you see schools going phone free and laughter returns to the hallways and kids scores start going the other way, that's the human movement. When you see Jonathan height and the anxious generation succeed in getting all these countries

Speaker A

like Domino's flipping to ban social media for kids under 15 or 16, we have like now some massive percentage of the world's countries are doing social media bans. That's the human movement. When you see the 17 billion fine against

Speaker A

meta, that's the human movement. So if you define it as technology is not it's not just about AI policy, it's about technology encroaching on the things that are actually sacred to us. And if you if you define the problem that way,

Speaker A

there's actually a lot of momentum that we are making on this. And now we're seeing this kind of red line of uncontrollable dangerous AI behavior.

Speaker A

And the human movement has to stand for we want to protect the continuity of the things that we care about.

Speaker A

Yes. Yeah. It's such a unifying message to because it's all of us against the machines.

Speaker A

Exactly. Exactly. It's the most unifying issue of all time. I love that. I I absolutely love that.

Speaker A

That's a kind of tribalism that I can get strongly. Right. Amen. Yeah. Thank you. That was an amazing amazing conversation.

Speaker A

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tucker.

Topics:AI risksTristan HarrisTucker CarlsonAI arms raceregulatory capturerogue AIAI hackingtech oligarchsartificial general intelligencetechnology ethics

Get More with the SozAI App

Transcribe recordings, audio files, and YouTube videos — with AI summaries and speaker detection. 30 minutes free.

App Store Google Play

Or transcribe another YouTube video here →

Free tools: TXT to SRT · SRT Validator · Merge SRT · Subtitle to Text · All tools